Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (23 page)

Levitin eventually circles back to Dylan to close the discussion of the divine, but I'm going to push forward into the white blindness of faith to draw a closer bead on where Mitchell really stands in the face of the Almighty and organized religion.

At the age of seven, Mitchell says, she broke from the church because it demanded empty-headed, mechanical worship, a concept that little Joan Anderson found repugnant to her wide-open prairie sensibilities. Two years later, she contracted polio and was told she might never walk again. She decided to pray. But she didn't know whose name to summon for help. “The Bible stories were full of loopholes. I liked the stories, but they didn't like my questions,” she says.
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Joni Mitchell questions all theology. It's one of the reasons why you should never, ever, call her a “confessional songwriter.” “It's as close as someone could come to calling me a nigger,” she says.
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Mitchell hates the term because it has religious connotations, namely the patriarchal brand of Christianity that spawned places like the Magdalene laundries—the home of horrors for unwed mothers she describes in her song of the same name, where the “bloodless brides of Jesus... leech the light out of a room.”

As she told
Mojo
's Robert Hilburn: “To be called a ‘confessional writer' is repugnant to me... The term makes what I do seem cheap and gimmicky. ‘Confession' to me is having a gun stuck to your head or going, ‘Forgive me Father for I have sinned.' That's not what I do. If someone calls me a confessional writer, it is ignorant and insulting.”
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During her in-depth interview with Mitchell in 2007, Michelle Mercer brought up the topic of St. Augustine of Hippo.
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Considered the father of autobiography for his thirteen-tome collection
Confessions
, written in the fourth century, St. Augustine hoped that in writing about himself, and attaining safe creative distance, he would know himself better. “I have become an enigma to myself,” he wrote.

Mitchell calls St. Augustine a “champion bullshitter,” who cut out huge chunks of what would later become the Bible—including the chapter on Lilith, Adam's sister and the inspiration behind Sarah McLachlan's femme-centric rock tour, Lilith Fair. Mitchell also accuses St. Augustine of phoniness, because he claimed to look at himself in the mirror but actually lied about what he saw so he could prop up a false god. Mitchell accuses him of replacing the creator's impulse, the very lifeblood of the universe, with dogma, a leech that sucks passion, originality, and sex from our existence.

Everything that was magic about the human condition—namely our ability to create through intellect and through flesh—was flattened through Augustine's prudish, guilt-laden lens. “Through a synchronistic event... he opened up [the Book of Romans] and came across this passage that was really hostile to lust,” she says. “This synchronicity was something that people valued back then. Of course, it's still alive and well today in the arts community.” Sadly, Augustine misinterpreted the pulse of the spheres and, in turn, warped the very foundation of the Judeo-Christian approach to creation. “He formed this crazy interpretation of Genesis,” says Mitchell.

The artist in Mitchell clearly didn't like the way the fourth-century thinker put the body in a cage of dogma, and she didn't like the way he translated the great relationship between god and earth, between the creator and the creation, into one of good and evil, of blind righteousness and punishment.

It's partly this religious baggage that makes the “confessional” label so repulsive to Mitchell. She says the only real confession she's ever made in a song was when she admitted in “Man to Man” (on the 1982 album
Wild Things Run Fast
) that when she's scared she gets “phony” and “stoney.”

That Mitchell is in touch with her “phony” moments is important, because it suggests she's aware of where her truth lies—an awareness she achieved by questioning herself, her creative power, and the great Creator. This act of questioning is the first step towards self-creation; according to Zarathustra, “What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness grows loathsome to you, and your reason and your virtue also. The hour when you say: What good is my pity? Is not pity the cross upon which he who loves man is nailed? But my pity is no crucifixion!”
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Mitchell experienced this great hour of contempt in the wake of achieving celebrity and fame. She attracted the attention of the masses, who identified with her, cried with her, loved with her, and worshipped her. The more blood she poured onto the page, the more acolytes she pulled to her heaving chest. But eventually the cycle grew repulsive and she had to destroy her own god-like image. She didn't enjoy her role in the propagation of adoration because she found the texts hypocritical, a point she makes in the under-discussed song “The Priest” from
Ladies of the Canyon
:

Then he took his contradictions out
And he splashed them on my brow
So which words was I then to doubt
When choosing what to vow
Should I choose them all—should I make them mine
The sermons the hymns and the valentines
And he asked for truth and he asked for time
And he asked for only now

Inexplicably, this song about a priest has been tagged to Mitchell's relationship with Leonard Cohen because it describes a “holy man,” the same phrase contained in “Rainy Night House” (“You are a holy man on the FM radio”), which has also been called a song about Leonard Cohen. Mitchell dismisses as erroneous all lyrical nods to Cohen, save the lines in “That Song About the Midway.” The more likely inspiration for “The Priest” is Nietzsche, especially in light of the fragment: “Come let's run from this ring we're in / Where the Christians clap and the Germans grin.”
Zarathustra
has a whole chapter, “Of the Priests,”
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dedicated to men of the cloth. Nietzsche writes about the spiritual emptiness of the churches where “false values and false scriptures” collect dust in “counterfeit light” and “musty air.” Only when the roofs have blown off to reveal the blue sky and the limitless truth of man would Zarathustra be able to see the priestly mission as spiritually correct: “Only when the clear sky again looks through broken roofs and down upon grass and red poppies on broken walls... will I turn my heart again towards the places of God.” Nietzsche's thoughts are translated into Mitchell's lyrics, in which the old saint trashes the open sky of free thinking, while at the same time acknowledging the emptiness of his cathedral: “He said you wouldn't like it here / It's no place you should share / The roof is ripped with hurricanes / and the room is always bare.”

These hollow images reinforce the idea of an absentee creator, or a god who listens to the cries of his creations without compassion. Either way, man has been abandoned— and if there's one story that gets to the very nub of faith, spiritual ambivalence, and the mystery of creation, it's the story of Job—the man who had everything until God decided to take it away as a test of faith at the Devil's urging. Job is considered the greatest literary work in the Bible. It's also the basis for
King Lear
and the reason why we have the expression “in the pits”—because that's where Job ends up, sitting in an ash pit surrounded by the ruins of his former life. Job will always resonate because people always ask God: “Why me?”

This was Job's chorus, and it's one Mitchell takes to heart in her song “The Sire of Sorrow.” “Let me speak let me spit out my bitterness / Born of grief and nights without sleep and festering flesh,” Job says in the song. “Once I was blessed; I was awaited like the rain / Like eyes for the blind, like feet for the lame / Kings heard my words, and they sought out my company / But now the janitors of Shadowland flick their brooms at me.” He cries out to his god: “Oh you tireless watcher! What have I done to you? / That you make everything I dread and everything I fear come true?”

When Job asks God, “Tell me why do you starve the faithful? / Why do you crucify the saints? / And you let the wicked prosper / You let their children frisk like deer / And my loves are dead or dying, or they don't come near,” he is answered by “the antagonists,” as they're labelled on the lyric sheet: “We don't despise your chastening / God is correcting you.”

On recordings of the song, the antagonists are played by an all-male chorus with stern voices. They could be seen as Job's jeering friends who've now turned against him because he's no longer popular. Or they could be read as the hostile voice of God, because they certainly offer no answer—just as God offered Job no easy answer. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the universe?” is what God asks Job. In essence, I am the greatest creator you could ever know, so how could you possibly decipher my meaning? I am mysterious, and divine, so shut up and take it.

Job has fascinated many, including Nietzsche, who wrote a whole chapter in
Zarathustra
called “The Sorcerer”—Job's story,
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told through a post-God lens. “What do you want, waylayer, from me? You God veiled in lightning! Unknown one! Speak, What do you want, unknown—God?” When Zarathustra sees the old man whining to the heavens, he loses his patience because it's such a weak pose: what loser keeps knocking on a door that no one answers? Zarathustra whops the whiner on the side of head with his cane and mocks his pathetic display. “In whom was I supposed to believe when you wailed in such a fashion?” he says. The miserable man answers back: “The penitent of the spirit... it was he I played: you yourself once invented this expression—the poet and sorcerer who at last turns his spirit against himself, the transformed man who freezes through his bad knowledge and bad conscience.”

Mitchell told
Mojo
writer Barney Hoskyns that “The Sire of Sorrow” came out of a difficult time—she was being sued by her housekeeper for an alleged kick to the shin and had been suffering through two years of dental surgery—when she was asking, “Why me?” The sandpaper of self-pity left a few scars, but it also scraped the surface clean. The song was cathartic. As she says, it was a way for her to “cleanse” herself; she didn't want to carry the darkness forward. She didn't want her loved ones to feel “burdened by [her] bitterness.”
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There is a healing penitence in her creative spirit, and this brings up the other most-used phrase in the Mitchell-Nietzsche search parameter: “The new breed of poet” who is “the penitent of spirit.” Zarathustra talks about the poets at length because they are the verbal creators with endless capacity to speak truth. As a result, they are on the front line of change. The tragedy for Zarathustra is that too few poets really plumb the depths: “I have grown weary of the poets, the old and the new,” he says in “Of Poets.” “They all seem to me superficial and shallow seas. They have not thought deeply enough... They are not clean enough for me either: They all disturb their waters so they may seem deep. And in that way would like to show themselves reconcilers, but to me they remain mediators and meddlers, and mediocre and unclean men!”
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Mitchell often refers to this passage. In a 1985 interview with
Musician
magazine's Bill Flanagan,
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she talks about her seminal Nietzschean encounter with Mr. Kratzman, then goes on to talk about her desire to live the life of the penitent poet—getting awfully close to the exact wording from
Zarathustra
, proving she's pretty much committed it to memory (as Nietzsche would have hoped—he said people who write in aphorisms don't want to be read, they want to be known by heart). “I had a great seventh grade English teacher who told me it was important to write in my own blood. And I had become a fan of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
: ‘The Poet is the vainest of the vain, even before the ugliest of water buffalo doth he fan his tail. I've looked amongst him for an honest man and all I've dredged up are old godheads,'” she quotes. “‘He muddies his waters that he may appear deep.' And on and on, insulting the poet mentality.”

Mitchell pauses on the poetic note and finishes her
Zarathustra
citation with a nod to the new breed of truth seeker: “‘But I see a new breed. They are the penitents of spirit. They write in their own blood.'” Mitchell was transformed by the idea of the penitent poet who sees his art as part of his larger creative purpose, whether it's embraced by the masses or not. “I thought, ‘Yeah, that's the only way to do this with any kind of dignity,'” she says. “I don't think I even thought about the risk. I just thought this had to be done. But then you find out that when you get slammed, it's you that's getting slammed, not your act. Everything is that much more personal.”

In urging Mitchell to dip her nib into a throbbing artery of personal experience, Mr. Kratzman started her on a lifetime voyage of deep personal discovery. He pushed her to be original at every turn, and for the first half of her career, this inspired legions of loyal fans to respond to her work in a deeply personal way. The second half of her professional life wasn't as charmed because her creations weren't always embraced. They were often too innovative.

Mitchell's first creative turn towards penitence was
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
. “No one understood that album,” said Mitchell. Says Zarathustra: “They do not understand me, I am not the mouth for these ears.” The very same words seem to spring from Mitchell's mouth over the course of her career: “I have in my time been very misunderstood,” she told Penny Valentine, iterating a line she would repeat in almost every interview she's ever done.