Friday, February 18, 2011

Kristin Hersh: Paradoxical Undressing

I am reading Kristin Hersh's book, Paradoxical Undressing, at the moment.
The lifestyle she had will be recognisable to a lot of people who have lived life for their band and their music- you will put up with almost any sort of physical deprivation rather than stop the driving force that propels you forward.
I remember reading a popular psychologist's piece about the ego of the performer, and how there is something wrong with a person who wants to be looked at on a stage all the time. But it's not like that, popular psychologist! Most people who end up in bands or similar end up there because they can not fit in to the world that other people inhabit; it's not that they choose not to.
She was brought up by benignly hippyish parents, who seem to have been nurturers, but she suffered a terrible accident from a hit-and-run motorist that disrupted her life completely when a head injury compounded with her natural synaesthesia caused her to hear constant noise in her head.
Hersh describes vividly the pull her songs have on her while she's otherwise engaged talking to people, or driving: it is physical and tangible to her, in the same way hunger or thirst are to a person who is not an artist or musician. She describes the way she feels as like a scientist (she is rather scathing about artists and their painty jeans).
What is most interesting is the sense of how powerless she is in relation to her creativity: it drives her relentlessly onwards and she has little sense of herself. There is little calm at the centre of her storm; instead she is either observing dispassionately, noting when people are either kind or unkind, or suffering in a vortex of noise until she disengages from music by handing a song over to her band to share with her.
This is a very interesting book: within the world of the outcasts, there are many different personalities, with different motivation and different ways of expressing themselves.
On one level, I don't understand her at all, but on another level, I am really grateful to her for articulating her difference so clearly and with such engaging style!

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