It's hard to find satisfaction in this world. It’s a huge and wonderful thing when a need is met. Be it food, water, shelter, warmth when it's cold, a cooling breeze when it's hot, some needs are easier to negotiate than others. Love and friendship are the hardest to obtain. And maintain.
And there are yearnings that are nameless, that can’t
be defined, not entirely, and drive you nuts. Because you can’t describe it. It
exceeds the reach of language. It’s a mystery whose odysseys assume mythic
proportions. People scale mountains looking for it. Take powerful
hallucinogens. Go on long pilgrimages. Prey to saints and gods and spirits and coy
apparitions. Fast. Meditate. Maneuver their way to power. Take risks. Write
novels. Thunder over the country on Harleys.
Most everything on TV is a lie. It’s a kingdom of
seductive illusions. The Stones – quite possibly the most prominent hedonists
of the last few riotous decades - made a song about it. “Can’t Get No
Satisfaction” held the number one spot for four weeks in July & August of
1965.
You have to love the irony of Keith Richards being the
author of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and the one providing the most - if not
all - the obstructions in its making. He had the fewest satisfactions, as it
were, in keeping with the plaint of the title. The opening riff came to him in
a dream. He insisted on horns for those five famous opening notes. And he
worried about some songs he’d unconsciously borrowed from, namely Martha and
the Vandellas “Nowhere to Run” and Chuck Berry’s “30 Days” with the line “can’t
get no satisfaction from the judge,” and was hesitant to release it for that
reason. Fortunately, he got voted down by the others.
The first time I heard Satisfaction I was in a
Lamborghini with Kim Novak heading east out of Nice on Autoroute A8 with a view
of the Alps to the north and the glitter of the Mediterranean below. Kim wore a
blue silk scarf and I had just had a cast removed from my right arm. I fell
from a table while attempting flamenco under the influence of a little too much
Quemada while Kim was filming a movie based on my novel The Savage Vagina,
directed by John Huston, and co-starring Robert Mitchum and Yves Montand. It
was a heady romance poured straight from a jug of bottled lightning, the
breeziest of flings, but oh we had fun.
Which is a lie. Albeit a satisfying one.
Governments lie to their people all the time. Which
everyone finds satisfying. If they knew the truth they’d go mad. Run riot in
the streets. Create cults. Worship bonfires of burning men in the Nevada
desert. Revolt. Languish, crushed and demoralized, in tropical opium dens.
On the level of pagan celebrations, the signified is
always overshadowed by the play of signifiers.
I wonder what the 60s looks like to someone born in 2001 or 2002. Probably how 1860 looks to me, in my imagination, of civil war soldiers looking tired in front of open fires or Emily Dickinson wandering a garden or Herman Melville scaling a mast or Walt Whitman helping the wounded write home. And in the fields of the Ardennes in northern France Arthur Rimbaud dreams of hopping onto a river barge and drifting out to sea, into the furious lashing of the tides.
2 comments:
absolutely brilliant, john! however, i've always thought of rimbaud as being utterly modern - 'one must be absolutely modern' - & his time of the mid to late 19th C was so vividly rendered in his poetry, his life as a vagabond, his work as a trader in africa, & his keening intellect was also my time too. but then hell, i too was born in what the kids call today the 1900s!
Thank you, Richard, for your kind and generous response. Yes, Rimbaud does seem far more modern than the century in which he lived, walked huge distances, crossed deserts, and displayed the kind of fury and mania more endemic to our time. Jim Morrison was so taken by Rimbaud's example he wrote to Wallace Fowlie to thank him for his translations.
Post a Comment