"Get Thee Out"

A note on reading to write, and finding the threads that keep you moving.

It’s page turning season. I’ve been focused the past several weeks on getting back into a sustained practice of reading and writing on a daily basis. It’s been good. I think I might be tapping into the weird vibration that gets towards a batch of new songwriting.

I had a hard time writing words for a lot of last year. When January arrived, this moment of newness, relative calm, fewer gigs and indoor weather, I knew I needed to dive deep, stir the pot and kick up some dirt — that is, read and write with intention and sustained attention. The experience has been really varied. Sometimes it’s felt like regenerating stripped soil. At other times it’s been more like dusting the top of a ceiling fan, looking at a foreign body of water, flying into a window.

~~~

I tend to write groups of songs in a single, related burst. The different images and ideas often stem from some kind of generative central theme or question or notion that feels resonant and seemingly inexhaustible. When that’s happening, one song or specific idea tends to conjure or provoke another. And then, after a while, there’s this collection of interrelated things, and it’s going to be an album. My writing has gone this way for more than 10 years. And I’ve been digging for another theme, hoping for another chain reaction.

But, in my experience, you can’t dig or hope too hard. You can use effort to set the stage, arrange the furniture, nourish yourself, etc., but to really get toward it you’ve got to ‘get out of the way,’ as they say. That act of seeking inspiration and direction seems to work best when you follow something not because it’s directly promising, but because it feels somehow compelling. In a way that’s hard to name. Because that’s the sort of windy movement in the dark that leads towards something inexhaustible. And it’s a way of tricking your conscious self into taking up a little less space.

I’ve realized recently that I’m starting to follow a thread again — but I can’t tell you directly about it. I mean, a) I really couldn’t if I tried, and, b) I think it’d be detrimental to even attempt to do so in any concrete and public way at this early stage. I think this creative inspiration stuff is fragile and precious and I mean that in the most shamelessly woo-woo way possible. When we’re talking about writing or composing or improvising I think we’re talking about something like actual magic, and therefore I think we’re talking about something that’s notoriously dangerous to fuck around with casually. There’s a sense in which I need this thread I’m pulling on to be private, mysterious, esoteric — occult! — in order to keep it from withering in the daylight or destroying its enchantment with a vain attempt at a totalizing summary.

But I will share some choice pull quotes from my recent reading. Because that’s where the juice has been for me. This is the stuff that’s left me chewing and chewing and chewing. Maybe they’ll be interesting to some of you too.

So, here are three passages I’ve read this month that are currently swirling around in my personal cauldron.

~~~

The first bit is from Clarice Lispector’s The Passion of G.H.¹ It’s a novel narrated by a single character who painstakingly recounts a vivid and transformative mystical experience she has while alone in her apartment. I’ve never read anything like it. Here’s the character G.H. towards the end of the book:

“My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty handed. But — I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be give to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.” (emphasis mine)

There’s something about the need to fail in order to get to this mystery that feels so resonant, so true and so challenging. I think that’s about all I can say about this one right now.

Second, from the story “Get Thee Out” from Sholom Aleichem’s collection, Tevye’s Daughters.² These stories were the basis for Fiddler on the Roof. The originals have more mud. In this portion of the story, Tevye and his eldest daughter Tzeitl, a young widow, are being forced out of their home, along with all of the rural-dwelling Jews in their region of Ukraine, by a Russian Imperial Government decree. Tzeitl is distraught over having to leave their home and Tevye tells her,

“When God appeared to our great-great-great-grandfather Abraham and said to him, ‘Get thee out of this country,’ did Abraham question Him? Did he ask, ‘Where shall I turn?’ God told him, ‘Go unto the land which I will show thee.’ Which means, ‘…into the four corners of the earth.’ (emphasis mine)

Tevye always plays fast and loose with his quotes and interpretations. It’s part of his character and “all-pervading charm … The juxtaposition of a lofty phrase in Hebrew or Aramaic with a homely Yiddish phrase which is supposed to explain it but has no bearing on it whatever—that is the gist of Tevye’s humor.”³ But here, Tevye is not only being unwittingly cute or funny. He’s getting at something deeper, something that resonates now: Tevye does not believe in arriving at the promised land. After the death of his wife Golde, his character gets an opportunity (probably around 1910) to move to Palestine. He doesn’t go. He stays in his hometown to take care of his newly widowed daughter. Though he doesn’t say so explicitly, I believe Tevye is expressing an affinity for something like doikayt, or ‘hereness’, something that now might be referred to as Diasporism.

While these are not necessarily reflective of the author’s politics, the views of his most famous character seem to point to the spiritual condition of exile as a foundational condition of his identity as a Jew and as a person in the world. In the act of ‘getting out,’ of stepping into the difficulty of being uprooted and affirming hereness —wherever that may be — as a condition of existence, he will also end up forgiving his third daughter, Chava, for marrying a non-Jew, perhaps the ultimate taboo of that time and place. For me, this is a poignant moment in which the affirmation of exile is a gateway to humility and radical love, and an illuminating contrast to a nationalism rooted in an idea of blood and soil.

The third, and last quote is by Gershom Sholem, the seminal 20th century scholar of Jewish mysticism. (Yes, there’s been a theme to my reading this month.) He writes about the 36 tzadikim nistarim, or ‘hidden saints.’

According to a tradition that goes back to Talmudic times there are, in every generation, thirty-six righteous men who are the foundations of the world. If the anonymity, which is part of their very nature, were broken, they would be nothing. One of them is perhaps the Messiah, and he remains hidden only because the age is not worthy of him. Especially among the Hasidim of Eastern Europe, later generations spun endless legends about these most obscure of men, whose acts, because they are performed so entirely beyond the ken of the community, are free from the ambiguities inseparable from all public action.

I think there are a lot of ways to interpret the meaning of this idea. And in fact, as Sholem mentions, there are a lot of popular legends and variants.⁴ But I’m going to stick here with this passage which emphasizes that the 36 tzadikim nistarim are acting with intentional anonymity. For me, living in and participating in an economy of ubiquitous personal-brand-building, these inevitable “ambiguities” of public speech and action are tricky to work through sometimes. To state the obvious: expressing any kind of authentic message or vulnerability in a online social space can so easily be viewed with cynicism. How does one get past that?

And that’s where passage gives me a strange comfort: the contaminating ambiguity around public speech and action is not new to our digital age. And for me, this notion of the Lamedvovniks (the Yiddish term for the 36), these anonymous righteous people that hold the fabric of the world together in the pureness of their humble invisibility, is a nice foil for real human lives and real human communication. None of us, if we are to be a part of any community, could be such a figure. At a fundamental level we are required to weather the challenge of communicating through that messy ambiguity. We have no alternative, we are not anonymous mystical hermits conjuring divine goodness in the shadows. For better or worse, we live in history, not outside of it. So, we do our best. And we do our best to give grace to others and to discern between the real (however flawed) attempts at communication in our communities and the truly cynical and exploitative content and algorithmic underpinnings of our informational systems and attention economy.

And maybe, in our time, we can collectively improve the context in which we talk to each other.

~~~

Thanks for reading my weird book report.

Now some questions for you:

I’m wondering, if you are someone who thinks about cultivating creativity in your own life, how do you do it? Where do you go looking for inspiration? What tools do you use to get at it? Do you find that your process stays similar across time? Has it changed?

Did you find something surprising or interesting here? Did I get anything wrong? I’m not an expert on any of this material.

Also, what are you reading?

I would love to hear form you, either in the comments or privately.

~~~

Upcoming Shows:

2/21 - Forest Park, IL - V.V. Lightbody & Minor Moon (duo set) supporting Sima Cunningham at Robert’s Westide :: tickets

3/27 - Berwyn, IL - Minor Moon (full band set) supporting Racoma (great tunes from Seattle) at Fitzgeralds :: tickets

4/28 - Chicago, IL - Minor Moon at Thawed Out Fest, two stages, all day at iO theater :: with Rosali, Rich Ruth, David Nance & Mowed Sound, The Curls and more:: tickets on sale 2/10 at 11 am CT.

~~~

And as always, here is a piece of music. It’s an exploration of a single riff I was stuck on a couple of weeks ago. I’m trying to get my home demo muscles back in shape, and enjoying just moving with an idea. Mostly one take and improvised, nothing too precious. Maybe it’ll turn into something else. I don’t know.

I performed the guitars, bass and drums here. I named the file ‘Headless in D.’

Thanks for being here.

-Sam

1. Clarice Lispector, The Passion of G.H. 1964. Translated by Idra Novey. New York: New Directions, 2012. (p. 186)

2. Sholom Aleichem. “Get Thee Out.” Tevye’s Daughters. 1949. translated by Frances Butwin. New York: Crown Publishers, 1965.

3. Tevye’s Daughters. 1949. translated by Frances Butwin. New York: Crown Publishers, 1965.

4. In another (I think more popular) interpretation, the Lamedvovniks could be anyone, even or especially someone who does not even know that they are one. This is a powerful idea too, though in an almost opposite way to Sholem’s (more traditional?) version. For instance, here’s a bit from Wikipedia about an episode of TV (that I vaguely remember watching at the time): “In the 2016 television series Transparent, season 3, episode 5, "Oh Holy Night", Rabbi Raquel Fine, while holding a lit candle, addresses the attendees of a Hinei [gathering] with a discussion of the who the 36 people who sustain the world's righteousness may be. "Who are these 36? We don't know. Even the 36 don't know. So what is the lesson? The lesson is to treat each other...as if we might be one. Or who knows? You might be standing next to one now."