vivian shaw

A great combination

A great combination: Neil Young’s album Harvest and reading Cary Tennis’ Since You Asked column on Salon.com. Separately and jointly, these two talents tap into some of our most human sensibilities and sufferings.

Far from giving us a recipe to corrective, or even, practical action, Cary Tennis is a bit like a pastor for a secular and urbane readership—elevating advice to both a literary and potentially, spiritual form. His responses tend to balloon outward, from the specifics of the letter writers’ (LW) struggles to larger questions of universal human experiences and our individual roles in negotiating these materials.

Here’s a snippet from one I liked quite a bit, his response to a letter writer seeking counsel on how to regard his brother-in-law who had cheated twice on his sister, both times while she was pregnant. Agree or not, could we call this philosophy “radical acceptance?”

“You may be prevented from letting go of this because of unshakable moral conviction. Surely he violated his marriage vows. Surely his actions caused pain to others. But they flow from something we all share: our hunger and incompleteness, our tragic fragmentation of the spirit. If you can come to see that, then you can see these reprehensible acts as expressions of his flawed nature rather than as acts against your sister.”

I’ve loved Heart of Gold for quite a while. But what I noticed pretty recently with Harvest is an artist’s profound respect for the rhyme. On one hand, effortless, but creating a real sense of satisfaction and echoing, like all good rhymes should. Which reminds me of a class I took with Emily Fragos, a real visionary of a poet—she was a big fan of perfect rhyme.

So, I’m no literary or music critic, but there’s a nice oceanic experience one gets from this combination. Try it out some time!

Edit: I e-mailed this post to a friend who strongly disagreed with Cary’s advice above, especially in the context of a cheating spouse. Since I left so much of the rest of the letter out, I should clarify that the letter writer had already generally accepted that his sister’s husband was to be a permanent fixture in their family life, and was asking for an emotional means of coping with this. I assume the response would have been quite different were it the wife writing for help on making a decision about her marriage, for instance. Moreover, I get the sense that LWs seek Cary’s thoughts less as “how to” advice and more generally to hear a compassionate, very human, and nonjudgmental response framed with a touch of the literary.