Just seen this on ents24

Jonathan playing at the Green Man Festival, Glanusk Park, Nr Crickhowell, Wales
Fri 17th Aug - Sun 19th Aug - don't know which days.


Bob C

Less Than Perfect¹, More Than Special²

An appreciation of Vic Chesnutt done almost entirely in two footnotes.

Image: rb

¹ Of course ‘less than perfect’ describes how Vic Chesnutt saw himself.

² And ‘more than special’ describes how everyone else, everyone who was touched by his presence and had the privilege to glimpse the gleanings of his spirit, how everyone else saw him and could not, could never adequately articulate what they knew (knew, to have known, to know, as in the biblical sense, which can be carnal, sure, why not, if you want that meaning but is more like what happens when a soul encounters a soul and KNOWS and things progress from there to a sort of a bang and a bang and a bang and a bang and a bang to the spawnings of fathomless universes heretofore unknown and undreamt of and mysterious in their workings, circling in their relations, enchantments and horrors) in instinct but not in words, and the exhaustive impossibility of ever being able to describe this special quality to anyone who has never experienced it (can you really describe a moment of EUREKA to someone who has no conception of such a moment and its divergence of the pathways of a lifetime but can only see what is comfortably familiar and the illusion therewith? Or can you accept that a mind must mature to acquire some of the finer nuanced tastes and there is nothing really you can do about it as this is that other person’s journey to embark upon or not?) I digress.

I tried to begin writing this in the first days of Vic’s passing. I couldn’t.

Image: rb

#515

There is a pain—so utter—
It swallows substance up—
Then covers the Abyss with Trance—
So Memory can step
Around—across—upon it—
As one within a Swoon—
Goes safely—where an open eye—
Would drop him—Bone by Bone—

-- Emily Dickinson (one of Vic Chesnutt’s many poet heroes)

The morning after he took wing I was in the Smoky Mountains with my husband where we had spent a somber Christmas day, and caught this sunrise, 26 December 2009, after a sleepless night:

Image: rb

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

-- Wallace Stevens (another of Vic’s poet heroes), from ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’