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On we go, back in time, to a song I wrote on my first album, Conversation with Francis Bakin from 2008, “River Now.” Gretchen plays guitar here, I’m playing the drums and singing, Rob Preston is on bass. These are some favorite lyrics, and at the time it felt to me as if the vocals weren’t strong, but now I can hear what I was going for, a stripped down, stark and wistful vocal treatment. The backing vocals were meant as a chorus of regular people singing, and I remember liking the way they fall in and out of key. These decisions illustrate my desire to paint a picture and let go of the need to make things that are “right.” Which contributes to the thwarting of pop star success, I guess.
Sometimes songs are cinematic, and this song evokes a complete movie that I experience when I sing it or hear it.
At the time I wrote this album, I was recovering from a kind of existential crisis. I was thinking a lot about meaning and purpose, and death, honestly, about the reality we see and the one we might break through to. So naturally, it occurred to me to write a song that might be played at my passing.
Put me on a raft
Send me out to sea
All the things I love all around me
Go out there in the middle of the night
With the dew on the ocean in the hot moonlight
A Viking funeral seems like one of the most poetic of endings, laid on a ship and sent off into the sea, set on fire to eventually sink to the depths. In my movie, there is no fire, and the body is laid on a raft with some favorite things, probably mostly books and photos and flowers and a stuffed animal or two. Vikings were sometimes sent out with live animals and servants which is gruesome and horrifying and makes me happy I’m living now, when and where I am. My vision is prettier and more peaceful than tradition, I’d say.
At sunrise when the mouth is feeding and
the bones lay out to dry
Go out there in the middle of the sea
I’ll sink to the bottom til you can’t see me
I went to college in Santa Cruz, California, and the last year there I lived near the meeting of the river and the sea. I heard river mouths were considered sacred to the Native Americans originally there, the energy of transition and renewal revered.
While I lived there, there was a large storm that washed some of the Santa Cruz mountains into the river. The river swelled, and this time didn’t flood, thankfully, but it carried redwood trees that slid down the mountain to the sea. These large beings caught on the posts of the train trestle, and there was a rush to free them before they caused a dam. At one point there was a huge whirlpool in the ocean of swirling redwood trees. It was ridiculously dramatic and powerful to see. For the whole summer there was so much wood on the beach that the city lifted the bonfire ordinance and there were many groups of people all summer enjoying evening bonfires with the revelry that often comes for survivors after nature exerts her power. That resilience in humans is something this song hints at.
Put me on a raft in the morning light
With a stone for a pocket and
Laid out right
Remember me and remember that
All the things we had to say
Are laid out in the ice-cold sand
They’re waiting for the water to wash up the land
Going down to the river now
Rivers are natural reflections of the changing nature of our reality. In every millisecond the river changes its face, becomes a new being.
I find this incredibly comforting. We ride a river of time, and we transform in every breath. The Clementine who starts writing this sentence is different than the one who gets to the end of it. My energy has shifted, my molecules have changed, my thoughts have moved. We have a sense of forward movement because that’s how we make sense, and that’s okay.
When I was struggling in that existential crisis, I lost sight of that constant movement and believed I was in a kind of stasis that might never change. This may be a great lesson in our suffering, that we suffer when we forget that even in the worst of times, there is always the possibility for something profoundly different to come. If we can hold on, that stuck place might be just an opening to the new and unimaginable.
Don’t grieve me
Bereave me
Don’t lay it on thick
What’s gone is gone
There’s nothing so quick
Just turn the corner and park along the bend
Life moves forward until the end
Going down to the river now
Death too seems a transition, an opening to the next moment. I have heard that hospice workers often see death as another birth, the death ward carrying the same energy as the maternity ward. I guess this is where I’m grateful in my faith that there is a continuation after this life. It is a great peace and comfort. I’ve tried to get with the program that this is all there is, but within the deepest knowing of myself, I don’t believe it. I guess we’ll see.
In the song movie, I see the cars that park along the highway on surf days, surfers in their wetsuits and their boards walking over the bluffs, down to the beach. I see people coming to send me off, parking like that in the turnouts along the two-lane Pacific Coast Highway. It’s a particular California image that is familiar and joyful to me. I do remember my childhood and the way the California coast seemed so open and rambling, so little development and the rolling hills and the smell of the sage and wild fennel and the salt on my lips, little shacks selling date shakes that we begged our folks to stop for. For all that we are constantly moving forward, we are always looking through the lens of our past.
In my movie, I see the happiness and celebration of people sliding down the dunes, coming to the beach to send me off. The memories lie on the sand there as I float to sea, and the water comes and washes them all away.
I don’t have a driving desire to leave a legacy. I guess many people without children don’t have that need to have our names live on. When I move my consciousness forward 1,000 years, there is so little here that will be remembered then. The language will be so different we wouldn’t understand it. Will a song live on? I hope those songs of Bach jangle through in some manner. Will art or buildings stay, or will they all be ground down into the sand to be washed by ocean waves? I guess time will tell. The river of time carries everything away, and this makes me wistful, but happy for some reason. I guess I have worked so hard to embraced change, it’s mostly a welcome thing. I guess that’s what hope is.
I like to think that some of these lower vibration energies we experience now will get evaporated with time. It’s hard for me to stay angry, to sustain a need for retribution, to want to destroy rather than caretake. Maybe moving forward, humanity just won’t be able sustain these things anymore. They burn hot, anger and hatred. They always burn out. I believe in the inherent good of people, that clearlight of the soul that is present in all. That’s what moves forward when we pass, to meet in an ocean of collective light. Our individual capacity to move from despair to hope is a universal energy carrying the collective forward. Each time we allow the river to change our awareness, to wash away the lower vibrations and carry us to the higher, all of humanity feels that potential and moves forward.
I might not live long enough to experience this collective lifting the way I’d like to see it, but I will continue to work to let go of my own weighted impulses, to meet whatever the future has for me, and to let the raft drift and carry me into that ocean of infinite potential.
