Second Thoughts

I had a cliche moment today when I pulled up the curtains and was blinded by an open, smiling blue sky. Nevertheless, I am amazed at the power of weather to make one forget everything and remember that the world holds surprises. It has not stopped raining for 8 days, until this morning. I skipped down the stairs with bedhead and flip flops, into the French market to buy tomatoes. Families were smiling and yelling and buying pastries. There was a general poetic climax of happiness in the air. Not happiness, maybe. I think a better word is joy.

I’m interested in the difference between the two. On Thursday we saw Antony and the Johnsons at Carnegie Hall. His songs are not happy, they’re achingly sad and beautiful, emotional and honest. In between songs at the show he was delightful and forthcoming, telling jokes and inviting the audience to sing along to his cover of Shania Twain while he told of a vision in the clouds when he met her.

He mentioned more than once how the number of sad songs we could handle was slowly diminishing, so he’d better hurry it up so as not to indulge us too much. Clearly it’s the only kind of song he knows how to sing honestly. But then he said something interesting, that he does all he can to nurture a sense of joy. It was right before singing “For Today I am a Boy,” a song which expresses such a sense of impossible desire, of overcoming physical biology and time, that I feel like crying every time I hear it. Lots of people cry during his songs, but what I realized during the concert, which came alive through his personality, was that it’s not the sadness that makes one cry; amidst the melancholy and lost hopes there is a cultivated, gently nurtured sense of joy. In this nurturing is the artistic struggle, in this the songs are saved from self pity. Joy and happiness are not the same thing, and joy, perhaps, is best seen amidst sadness. Joy requires for its definition unsatisfied desire, which itself becomes a state which is desired more than any other satisfaction. It is a belief in Timbuktu, or Arcadia, or whatever one wants to name that place beyond us that would be a place of home and peace and understanding. One doesn’t even have to believe it actually exists, maybe, and joy is not the same thing as faith, but one must certainly hope for something. Antony’s album is called I am a Bird Now and he repeatedly sings about becoming a bird and taking flight; this is impossible and it’s why he can remain joyful. There is equal parts grief and hope, grief for the impossiblity of this place, but hope for it despite. The ways in which he incorporates this hope for impossibility into gender, how his voice and persona performs in an androgynous, otherworldly space, is enchanting.

For the encore Lou Reed came out and played the Velvet Underground song “Candy Says” while Antony sang. It was a treat and a perfect end.