Rumours of Glory

by Bruce Cockburn

  Certainly, there was obsession and projection. With hindsight, I came to understand how I had found in this woman an idealizing mirror for the suppressed feminine in myself. She was my Beatrice, guiding me through the nine spheres of Dante’s heaven. When she was out of reach, I floated in a void of unutterable loneliness.

  The hills are full of secrets

  Owls watch by night

  Down in town the bars are full

  And the drunks are picking fights

  These are things I know

  But the facts are filtered through

  All the ways I want you

  2:19 freight train

  Moaning somewhere near

  I see you in the distance

  But I can’t get there from here

  Hard to believe it’s happening

  But my whole world’s shrunken to

  All the ways I want you

  Stars look down and laugh at me

  I ought to take a bow

  Don’t have to tell them life’s hard sometimes

  There’s one falling now

  Nobody’s here beside me

  I can talk about it to

  All the ways I want you

  “ALL THE WAYS I WANT YOU,” 1991

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/76.

  I remember thinking, even early in the game, before we knew where it would all go, this can’t have a future. Still, I felt like it was supposed to happen. Though I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling that I don’t fit well into human society, as long as I can remember I’ve had the sense that wherever I find myself is where I’m supposed to be. So was God showing me what it is to actually love somebody? I think so, but that was just the beginning. The obsession part may have been unhealthy when applied to a human, but I don’t think it’s out of place if applied to the Divine, which is something I continue to work at. The Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross recognized the human need to connect with one another in these powerful ways, at times suffering through our intimate relationships, to achieve a richer connection with God. Around 1578, while in prison for espousing reform ideologies, Saint John wrote,

  God usually sends these storms and trials in the night of sensory purification. . . . Chastened and buffeted, the senses and the faculties are honed, made ready for union with wisdom, which will be given there. After all, if, through trials and temptations, a soul is not tempted and tried, if she is not tested and proved, how can her senses be quickened with wisdom? In Ecclesiastes we are asked: “He who is not tempted, what does he know? And he who is not proved, what are the things he realizes?” . . . Those who have greater strength and capacity for suffering God purifies more intensively and more quickly. But the weak ones he keeps for a very long time in this first night, purging them gently, tempting them lightly. He frequently refreshes their senses so that they will not give up. These souls come to the purity of perfection late in life, if at all.

  I guess I’d be in that latter category, though I don’t think the “purity of perfection,” as I understand that phrase, is available to us on this plane. That feels to me more like human hubris. Nonetheless, the power is in the seeking. If you’re not growing, you die. If we don’t consistently try to make ourselves, and everything else, better, then we’re abrogating our core obligation as humans. Should I have responded to temptation by sticking to my dry and defended principles, by refusing an experience that could actually make me a better person? I don’t think so. The invitation was to open, to step out of my comfort zone, to trust, to love. Today I don’t feel closer to perfection, but I learned something vital about the heart. Some people I care deeply about can get closer to me. I was sent down a new road that hadn’t been on any of the maps I had studied, and there found a place of knowledge.

  I see you standing in the door against the dark

  Fireflies around you like a crown of sparks

  You blow me a kiss that blurs my vision

  Blurs the human condition

  You’re the ocean ringing in my brain

  You are my island ripe with cane

  Catch the scent of strange flowers when you pass

  Fluid motion like the wind in grass

  It’s your eyes I want to see

  Looking into mine

  Got you live on my mind

  All the time

  Light me like incense in the night

  Light me like a candle burning bright

  Light me like a searchlight in the sky

  Time means nothing when I look in your eyes

  It’s your eyes I want to see

  Looking into mine

  Got you live on my mind

  All the time

  “LIVE ON MY MIND,” 1993

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/77.

  My feeling for Madame X remained intense long after we stopped seeing each other. I continued to nurse it lovingly, it seemed of such momentous importance. I developed my own private cargo cult, not in the expectation of more romance being airlifted in—though I kept the embers alight until I knew for sure there was no chance we would ever come together again. While the glow of these embers illuminated my lack of understanding of my own psychic processes, and the many situations into which my misunderstood motives had led me, it also helped me see that I had an open invitation to learn about the deeper, often painful places of the soul whose dimensions I had hardly glimpsed at the conscious level. My empathy with the plight of others has always been present, but never so strongly as when I began to understand the emotional pain of an impossible love.

  In the end, what I came away with is that this is the way people are meant to connect: fully and with open hearts, hearing each other, occasionally risking all for the right reasons, one of those reasons being access to the Divine. If we don’t pursue these natural connections, we’re likely to forget them—especially in the digital age, when so much interpersonal relationship has been reduced to cyberhugs. Use it or lose it.

  Madame X remained dedicated to her marriage. Her husband wasn’t a terrible guy, but he didn’t always treat her well, and in other ways he didn’t seem right for her. She didn’t know how to extricate herself from an increasingly difficult scene. They stayed together for a few years after our brief encounter, but eventually broke up.

  I don’t know what I gave her. The duplicity we engaged in was ugly and deplored by both of us. As discreet as we tried to be, a committed partner is always going to feel uneasy at least. There was a lot of pain for everyone involved, but pain is as much a part of life as being born—just ask the newborn infant, squeezed out of the Eden of the womb in the guise of an angry little old person, resentful at being made to come back. Ask Saint John of the Cross, whose reform activism got him imprisoned in a six-by-ten-foot cell in a monastery basement, from which he was dragged into a public square for weekly torture sessions before he finally escaped. What I received from Madame X was an ability to move forward out of myself, to escape the pain of being trapped inside the nonexpressive structures I’d grown up with, and to see others in this newfound light. How long it had been since the brave words of “Fascist Architecture”! It was probably around this time that I started to really love my audience, too. The world of the heart opened up. It took a bomb, and the bomb was provided.

  There’s a bone in my ear

  Keeps singing your name

  Sometimes it’s like pleasure

  Sometimes it’s like pain

  It’s a small voice and quiet

  But I hear it plain

  There’s a bone in my ear

  Keeps singing your name

  In my heart there’s an image

  Like looking through glass

  Could be looking at me

  Could be looking right past

  I don’t like it when

  I can’t tell which is true

  But I wouldn’t trade the world

  For that picture of you

  Moon in the water

&nb
sp; Cold light in the streets

  Warmth in your fingers

  Sweat in your sheets

  Laid out like an offering

  Where two currents meet

  The river is dark

  But the water is sweet

  Wailing on the mountain

  Smoke on the wind

  Can’t drown out the whisper

  Or the scent of your skin

  Don’t know where it came from

  But I know where it came

  There’s a bone in my ear

  Keeps singing your name

  “BONE IN MY EAR,” 1993

  To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/78.

  As life (and, according to Saint John of the Cross, God) would have it, I had been heading to this point incrementally. Each previous relationship created its own opening and taught me about myself and others. For some people, this is all quite obvious: of course we learn and evolve as we go along. But it’s not a given that we’ll absorb these lessons. I was fortunate enough to have merged my life with that of strong and, each in her own way, caring women—Kitty, Judy, Madame X, even Sue—who were not afraid to take on my reticence, who were willing to work to break me out of it. Apparently they saw something that seemed worth the effort. Each partner pushed together a few more pieces of my psychic jigsaw—a heavily misted landscape, man of a thousand pieces—and contributed to my current condition and level of understanding, such as it is.

  In addition to all the spiritual celebrations and contusions, my encounter with Madame X brought me some good songs. Many of them appear on Dart to the Heart, the second album I did with T Bone Burnett, recorded in March 1993 and released in 1994. “Madame X songs” also showed up on The Charity of Night two years later, and after that on Breakfast in New Orleans Dinner in Timbuktu. That Dart to the Heart is full of love songs made for some awkward moments, because Sue was under the impression that all the “you” songs were for her, but they were not. Like a lot of my songs, they reflect a state of hunger. Even when the affair was ongoing, physical contact was limited. At times we were in the company of others and couldn’t betray our secret. We had some memorable days and nights together, but what might have been remained out of sight behind the horizon.

  As expected, T Bone worked magic on Dart to the Heart, though this creative excursion wasn’t as smooth or as much fun as Nothing but a Burning Light. While in production with Burning Light, T Bone told me he believed artists and producers should work together only once. As far as he was concerned, it was never as good after that. He said this in passing, and later he wouldn’t remember it, but I did. Nonetheless, I had such a good time during that first collaboration that I pushed for him to do the next one as well. Turns out he was telling the truth—his truth, anyway, because a total of five people have produced my thirty-one albums.

  The recording of Dart to the Heart didn’t unfold in the same atmosphere we had enjoyed with Nothing but a Burning Light. I was tense throughout. There had been no year off before this album; I’d been touring, writing, and seeing Madame X. I was anguished over her, and there was no one I could talk to about it.

  Early in the process, while we were still doing the basic recording in the studio at Bearsville, New York, tucked away in the broccoli near Woodstock, there arose a complicated four-way gripe between Bernie, T Bone, me, and Columbia’s financial office about money (of course). The cheque writers at Columbia had been difficult the first time around, but not in ways that mattered much. They took so long to send me the agreed-upon per diem for food that I ran out of U.S. dollars and had to threaten to start holding up milk stores if they didn’t hurry things up. More critical was T Bone’s gift for running up expenses. He was pretty good at deciding he needed an assistant whom Columbia should pay for, and the assistant was going to cost X amount over and above the original agreement, so he’d get on the phone with somebody at Columbia and push and prod, and he’d get his way. Then Bernie would get grumblings from Columbia that T Bone was costing too much, as if Bernie had any control over that. Then, in private, T Bone would complain to me about Bernie and finances, as if T Bone and I were together holding off the zombie business hordes from our forest hideout. After a while I got tired of hearing the bad-mouthing. I told T Bone that I was as much a part of the goings-on as Bernie and that he ought to quit picking on him. It actually wasn’t true; I knew very little about Bernie’s role in the finances around the album, but of course I was loyal to Bernie, who in any case is one of the most honest businessmen I know. T Bone’s body language suggested that my retort meant something to him. It was never the same between us after that.

  The album turned out well anyway, though differently than what either T Bone or I had pictured when we started out. Were I to change anything, it would be to make the rock-and-roll songs a bit more raw. Early on T Bone asked me, “What kind of album do you want to make?” I thought about the kind of songs I had, and told him I wanted to make something like the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. T Bone said, “I’ve never made an album like that. Let’s do it.” He came up with a cadre of players based on that idea.

  Casting around for a studio, he landed us at Bearsville—a snow-blanketed wonderland where early-morning deer hovered outside, nostrils frosted from foraging frozen ground. A far cry from Keith Richards’s basement, but a fine studio. Bearsville was established in 1969 by Albert Grossman, best known for managing Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, and less well known for being a mentor to Bernie Finkelstein. In 1986, at fifty-nine years old, Grossman died of a heart attack while crossing the Atlantic on the Concorde. His widow kept the studio running, and it remained an atmospheric and technologically well-endowed recording facility.

  For personnel we got the renowned rock drummer Mickey Curry, who had recorded with Bryan Adams, Tom Waits, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Hall & Oates, Tina Turner, and even Cher. Jazz drummer Chris Parker also played, taking over from Mickey for the last couple of tunes we laid down. The late Jerry Scheff, who had been part of Elvis Presley’s live band, played bass. That was our rhythm section.

  My gigs in support of Nothing but a Burning Light had been evocative and exciting. For the first time in a band setting, I had added another singing guitar player, Colin Linden. He and I met at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Toronto in the early seventies. He’d been mentored by Howlin’ Wolf and appeared on the scene as a fifteen-year-old prodigy, playing a deep and wide-ranging style of blues. When I was looking for another player to work with, Colin seemed an obvious choice. In fact, he came with a whole band—Miche Pouliot and John Dymond as rhythm section, and Richard Bell, who had played in Janis Joplin’s Full Tilt Boogie band, on organ and piano. Sam Phillips appeared as an opening act in most of the shows, and joined us on the tour bus. This road ensemble enjoyed a rare and lively camaraderie, so it seemed like a good idea to include at least part of it, Colin and Richard, in the Dart to the Heart band, infusing the studio sessions with the collective feel we had developed live.

  Greg Leisz played gorgeous, unorthodox pedal steel and Weissenborn guitar. Greg is especially absorbing on “Bone in My Ear,” which I wrote during the sessions. I came up with the music using an electric charango built by my luthier friend Linda Manzer. The charango is a lovely Andean instrument that looks a little like a ukulele but has ten uniquely tuned nylon strings. It’s pitched high like a mandolin but has a very different timbre. Colin played an actual mandolin as counterpoint to the charango. T Bone himself played a perfect drum part.

  It proved unexpectedly difficult to get good performances out of me, which frustrated both T Bone and me. My emotional state had spawned an internal atmosphere of self-sabotage, which had to be worked around. In the end we got what we needed, but it was more arduous than our first partnership.

  Once we had solid band performances on all the songs, and satisfactory performances from me, what remained was to overdub harmonies from Sam Phillips, a bit of extra organ from Benmont Tench, and a horn section made up of
L.A. session men Darrell Leonard, Christiaan Mostert, and Greg Smith. For that we moved to Los Angeles, where the album was also mixed—or so we thought. We got a good groove with the horns on the opening cut, “Listen for the Laugh,” a distinctly nonmeditative meditation on the unpredictability of love and its central function as the glue that holds the universe together. Sam is the angelic presence that pops up on “Love Loves You Too.” Pretty much the whole group shows up on “Tie Me at the Crossroads,” another raucous “meditation” on death and fame, which I’ve always thought of as a campfire song for the coming dystopia.

  Travelling to L.A. was a solitary pleasure. With all my road travel, I still hadn’t done a trip behind the wheel from one side of the United States to the other. I would rectify that. I packed all my gear into the back of my recently acquired black Suburban, leaving just enough room for my camp cot, and headed south and west. As I came out of the Blue Ridge Mountains into Tennessee, it started to snow. I made it to Nashville about dinnertime, had a bite to eat with my friend Pam Mark Hall, and then, as it was too cold to sleep in the truck, crashed at a hotel near the I-440 bypass. I awoke to find a couple of inches of snow on the ground, which in those parts meant that everything was closed or closing—schools, offices, highways. Behind me, six feet of white stuff had accumulated in the mountains. More might be on the way. At breakfast the TV featured a news anchor explaining that anyone heading outside should wear a hat, and even gloves! That had this Ottawa boy shivering in his shoes. Fortunately, I was westbound, and the storm reached to only about halfway between Nashville and Memphis, getting weaker as it went. Even so, for a long time the only things on the road were big rigs and me. There was more snow on the high pass west of Denver, very wet, and a lot of skidding traffic.

  Down off the backbone of the continent I soared into the desert for another encounter with a dry, windswept space. I had been reading Tony Hillerman’s mysteries involving Navajo tribal police and grew excited at reaching the Four Corners region, recognizing place names and highway numbers. Then into California . . . Needles, Barstow, the exotic array of wind turbines in the hills around Joshua Tree . . . finally coming to rest in Santa Monica.