Buckets Of Tears
Reader, we didn’t catch that plane. Hemmed in and trapped not only by a vast body of water, land and distance but by a gargantuan chimera of hysterical fear and inhuman bureaucracy we cancelled everything on Saturday and sat in our brightly sunny home with hearts as grey as stone.
There isn’t really a way to sugar coat this one or to wring good news out of such an ending to months of planning and joyful expectation. Nor should there be. Mankind’s continuing folly over our current situation is being paid for by families the world over in the currency of time lost never to be regained.
Until recently I had naïvely thought that we were beyond the fashion for restriction upon personal freedom and movement. As we sat and stared at the ruination of what had promised to be the first Christmas in over a decade where our family would be able to share the same time zone and the same room, it was painfully clear that we are very far away indeed from the time when anyone can make concrete plans for their future.
In such a circumstance, allowing the dark tide of despair to sweep one away seems almost unavoidable and yet we must continue to swim against the prevailing currents. For by moving forward from such setbacks with a sure sense of purpose and vast determination one can outwit the shrinkage and weakening which chase hard on the heels of failure to succeed in a positive course of action.
I drove along my beloved freeways yesterday afternoon as the wintry sun, which has returned with its warmth to Southern California, gleamed high above. I was tangled up as much in the blue of the sky as in some of my favourite lyrics of Mr Dylan which always remind me of a long ago moment in some French museum. We’d just been deep in The Valley at a regional rhythmic competition. To the winner goes the spoils as they say and we returned carrying the gold.
A little later on the drive, a lone guitar came through the stereo playing some old time melody, an outtake from Blood on the Tracks which I’m currently writing about, as it happens. It’s a song whose overwhelming sadness, conveyed both because of and in spite of the biting and heroic understatement of the singer, grabs me by the heart and squeezes it each time. Yesterday it had me by the throat. That sorrow I’m feeling is a new pathway into the song’s territory. It’s a way of seeing more feelingly the colours with which Dylan is painting; of coming closer to touching the exact shades of blue that are tangled up in each word that he sings.
Personal sadness and loss as explored with such haunting pain in the song and as experienced by us all at some point in this world of sorrows, can be used to reawaken our kinship with others. We can remember that as we feel pain, so do they, just as deeply, just as jaggedly and just as bleakly. Thus the ice in our hearts which we rely upon to shore up our sense of self, separate and all important, melts a little and we can for an instant feel another’s pain as our own.
Perhaps then for just one moment we can stand inside their shoes and carry their bucket of tears.
