Van Morrison

I’ve been listening to Van Morrison for hours every day since summer, listening to the same songs over and over and really feeling like I am communing, through the dementedness of repetition, with the eternal Van. Saying the Van rosary. My parents loved Van Morrison and played his songs on many long drives in the car, so his voice transports me to a specific past and also, because of its power, obliterates time and space. Like being in love, listening to Van’s songs leads me, slowly, as if going a great distance, to a place of restoration, only to show me that the place is inside my own self, invisible to me only because I am God’s beloved idiot. Listening to Van’s love songs, I’ve tried to imagine what Van was like in love, and what it was like to be in love with him. I’ve tried to imagine whether I could have fallen in love with Van Morrison if I’d had the chance to. 

I love Van Morrison’s songs because they seem to be sung by a mean little goat being rocked by waves of transcendent beauty. This touches me because it’s how I often feel about myself as I move through life. 

Allow me to describe Van Morrison’s head and face: Van Morrison has a great big head like a toddler and weary, watery eyes overhung by heavy brows the color and luster of antique brass. In fact all of Van is shades of brass. As I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed myself becoming more appreciative of men who are different shades of brass. I had no interest in these men when I was younger. Now I find them very relaxing to look at, like static. There’s a kind of practicality and humility to being one color that means more to me now than it did when I was younger and had more energy to devote to the admiration of men. The most beautiful part of the movie Roadhouse, which I have watched many times, fast forwarding through the fighting scenes, is Patrick Swayze’s hayloft apartment and how his hair and body blend in perfectly with the light wood of the walls and floors, making him one with the apartment. When he is out in the world kicking the shit out of people, you must believe it is on behalf of the apartment, and find your peace there. I don’t mean to suggest a kinship between Van Morrison and Patrick Swayze. They have both given a lot to the world, and to my world in particular, but apart from the visual drone of low-contrast hair and body, what they have given is different. 

Trying to imagine whether I would fall in love with someone is an old habit of mine that has never left me despite its utility passing away. When I was young, there was a long period of time during which I was ugly and spent all my time with my mom and my brother. This was a very romantic time in my life because almost nothing had ever happened to me, and my imagination was undisturbed by experience. Thinking about whether I would fall in love with someone was a way of asking myself who I was and what kind of life I wanted when those questions seemed impossible to face straight on. At this time, my bedroom was bright orange and I kept a small poster of Van Morrison beside my mirror. On the poster Van is standing with his hands behind his back surrounded by tall trees. He’s wearing all white like a holy man and he has one of his most mysterious haircuts, a wavy bob cut just below the ears. I’ve always loved this era of his hair because it lays bare his unsuitability for life on earth. Van Morrison does not belong in this world and should not have to have hair, and this haircut is a witness to that. Back then, although I spent many nights listening to Astral Weeks on my headphones, Van was not the subject of my daydreams because he was not my type. But now that I have lived with my own taste in things for many years and guarded it stridently against its detractors I feel I have discharged my duty to it and can say with tenderness that I am a little tired of my taste, and it is a joy to remember that I am a little hunk of God playing at being a person named Shannon Burns and I can play at liking anything I want to including men who look like old, busted babies and are also assholes.

When I ask myself now whether I could have fallen in love with Van Morrison I am not asking myself who I am or what kind of life I want to have; I am saying a prayer of thanks for what is. If I am a woman containing a woman who might have fallen in love with Van Morrison, who in fact might have chosen someone like Van Morrison as the companion of my life, then the fact of what I have chosen instead is all the more strange and fragile, all the more to be protected and stood before in wonder, terror even. If I am a free blob of God who is trying on life, within whom there are resonances to match the resonances of any number of configurations of wise and dumbass choices, then the particular contour of  wise and dumbass choices I have made is something very very precious. It is like an elegant bird that is teeny tiny and also solid gold, a thing that has fought hard against stiff competition just to be, and is both haggard from the fight and resplendent in victory. Without meaning to, Van Morrison has placed the image of this bird in my deepest heart.