Joy is Incongruous
I was recently mistaken by several strangers for a religious nutter and I would like to set the record straight.
I was singing while riding my bike and I noticed I was getting funny looks from people. It was early in the morning and I was really belting out the tune without a care in the world.
I suppose people don't generally sing in public unless it’s part of some socially sanctioned situation, like in a karaoke bar or as part of a Christmas choir dressed as a Dickensian snood knitter.
But why should it be this way? I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was moving in an open space, I wasn’t cornering anybody with my song…
Drunks sing of course. Late at night, after the pub, walking home full of Wordsworth’s ‘mead shined souls’ or gripped by Kerouac’s wine fuelled ‘ecstasies of the mind’.
I’ve been known to do that on occasion. But this was early morning and I hadn’t had a drink for days.
So why all the frowning San Diego?
It seems the only way you can sing in public is if you stand in one place and put a hat or something on the ground indicating that you are financially motivated. This scans well with the social narrative that people weave around them to navigate their way through life.
Of course crazy people also sing. They sing and they talk to themselves loudly. It’s possible that people were mistaking me for a lunatic.
‘Yes, it’s all very lovely… the sun is out and the flowers and cacti are beautiful and the inquisitive humming birds don’t quite know what to make of all the Monarch butterflies that have just flown in from Chicago BUT… tone it down Newsham or they’ll think you’re a mentalist.’
There were nurses on the way home from the nightshift at the hospital. There were dog walkers taking their best friends out for a poo. There were drivers sneaking sips of coffee at traffic lights and stop signs. And all of them were faintly disapproving of my song filled presence as I passed them by.
Do whales also get such disapproving looks from sharks and sea turtles when they start to croon? The history books certainly record that we haven’t took too kindly to their noise over the years. Those gigantic harps of the sea sang so powerfully to ancient mariners that the rotten boards of ships shook with their angelic moan and scared them so witless that they steered them onto rocks where the survivors gave birth to myths of sirens and sea monsters.
OK, you’re probably wondering what I was singing. This could certainly prove crucial in the judgment I can feel is already forming in your noodle.
I was singing a Tom Waites song.
Now hold on. Let me explain. It wasn’t one of the really mad ones. It wasn’t ‘Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis’ or ‘Cemetery Polka’ or even ‘Singapore’. I wasn’t barking gruffly about one-armed dwarfs and ‘Uncle Vernon’.
I was singing ‘Come On Up To The House’ from Mule Variations.
If you don’t know the song, it sounds kind of like a hymn, kind of religious.
But I didn't mean it that way. It seems spontaneous joy when expressed publicly is to be mistrusted and appears incongruous when not in a religious context.
Mormons instruct each other to keep a constantly happy face toward the outward world. It’s a recruitment trick used by many such cults. The Evangelicals are always smiling as they hand you the leaflet that says you’re going to Hell.
I’m not religious. I don’t need some comforting fable to make me capable of singing on a sunny day. In fact I feel kind of insulted that people would make that assumption about me.
But what can you do?
Stopping people and explaining that you are singing because you feel like it and not because Jesus says everything’s cool is impractical and might actually lead to more problems.
“Excuse me, I’d just like to point out that I’m not singing a hymn, it’s a Tom Waites song, I actually don’t believe in a three tiered universe…”
So I’d just like to state now, to straighten everything out, if you see me singing it’s just because I FEEL like it and NOT because I’m a religious maniac.
