Kris Kristofferson – To beat the devil: intimations of immortality

“Sad to say, it’s even worse today,” said Kristofferson, who included a song about an artist killed in a missile attack of Baghdad on his 2003 album Broken Freedom Song. “I can’t help but be appalled at the arrogance of our behavior as a superpower — the superpower — to attack a sovereign nation. To attack, basically, a bunch of people because you disagree with what their leader is doing. If that’s OK, then the rest of the world is going to be gunning for ours, because they certainly don’t like what our government’s doing.

“And the people who are paying for it are the people that we’re bombing. There’s no way in hell we can ever make up to the people in Iraq what we’ve done to them. There’s not been a time when I’ve been on the planet that I’ve been as depressed at the direction that our country’s been going.

“And it’s all being done in the name of God. It amazes me. It’s a real holy war going over there and I really have no idea how it’s gonna end up.”

A song on Kristofferson’s new album called “In The News” speaks to this idolatrous equation of divine will and human agendas with particular eloquence — as well as anything since Buddy Miller’s Universal United House Of Prayer, an album steeped in the wisdom and outrage of the Hebrew prophets. “Anyone not marching to their tune they call it treason,” Kristofferson sings, “Everyone says God is on his side.”

From here, just as he did in 1986’s “Love Is The Way”, Kristofferson goes on to portray God as an empathetic being who not only shares in human suffering, but who suffers at the expense of humanity’s habituation to death. “Don’t Blame God, I swear to God he’s cryin’ too,” he admonishes, before shifting voices to God’s. “‘Not in my name, not on my ground/I want nothing but the ending of the war/No more killing or it’s over/And the mystery won’t matter anymore.'”

PILGRIM’S PROGRESS: THE LAST THING TO GO

The mystery that’s at stake in “In The News” has fueled Kristofferson’s quest to discover and define himself from the beginning. On his new album, he gives most explicit voice to it in “Holy Creation”, a song steeped in a sense of the sacred inspired by Blake’s contention that “Everything that lives is holy.” Yet it’s only with another song on This Old Road, “The Last Thing To Go”, that Kristofferson, by way of a wry nod to his boxing past, links this mystery, which he ultimately identifies with love, to the burden and promise of freedom. “Love is the reason we happened at all,” he sings, accompanied by harmonica and acoustic guitar. “It paid for the damage we’d done, and it bought us the freedom to fall into grace.”

Kristofferson isn’t talking about love as if it were just another emotion like lust or boredom that comes and goes with our moods. He’s talking about love as a more pervasive — and maybe everlasting — force. A healing power that, more than just helping people make it through the night, makes freedom possible in the first place.

“Love to me is the only answer to what’s going on with the world today,” he said in December. “The kind of love I’m talking about is the kind that you feel unconditionally for your children. And if you work at it, you can get to where it includes others too. Which isn’t as easy as it is with your children, but I think it should work there.

“In the people we’ve been talking about, like John and June,” he went on to say, referring to the Cashes’ preternatural gift for embracing strangers and people on the margins, “it worked from there outward to where they could feel love for people they weren’t even related to. If you were to attain the highest state, I guess you would love everybody.”

The idea of reaching such an elevated state — yet another way of talking about soul-making — likewise derives from Blake. “He wasn’t, like, into organized religion,” Kristofferson is quick to point out, referring to Blake. “But he believed that if you didn’t do your duty as a creative person to promote spiritual communion, your soul was lost for eternity.”

In “Final Attraction”, the track that serves as the benediction on This Old Road, Kristofferson refers to the pursuit of this higher state as “approaching perfection” — an “intimation of immortality,” as Wordsworth put it. Kristofferson was inspired to write the song while waiting in the wings as Willie Nelson went back onstage to close a show:

Well, here you are
The final attraction
Awaiting direction
From somewhere above
Your final performance
Approaching perfection
I know what you’re making
Is some kinda love.

“Somewhere in your lifetime,” he goes on, now singing the song of himself — and others — to dusky filigrees of dobro and acoustic guitar, “You were dared into feeling/So many emotions/That tear you apart/But they love so badly/For sharing their sorrows/So pick up that guitar/And go break a heart.”

This process of breaking a heart, one’s own and those of others, is harrowing, and not just because it can be terrifying to dwell in the shadows — as Kristofferson, trying to beat his devils, so often has done. This practice of breaking a heart, of being torn apart by painful emotions, is also harrowing in the more pregnant sense of the verb “to harrow” that has fallen out of usage — that of the often violent process of breaking into the ground and opening it up to prepare for new growth and eventual harvest. Or, in Kristofferson’s case, the process of breaking into the cold, dark recesses of the heart to cultivate a soul.

Kristofferson goes on, in “Final Attraction”, to enumerate some of the other pilgrims he’s known, from Waylon Jennings to Mickey Newbury, who submitted to this harrowing process of soul-making. It’s a gesture reminiscent of how he sometimes introduces his old standby “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33”, the famous chorus of which begins, “He’s a poet, he’s a picker/He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher.”

Kristofferson has said that this song began as a study of Dennis Hopper, only to become associated with Johnny Cash. And yet “The Pilgrim” also describes Kristofferson himself — indeed, any of his fellow sojourners who took every wrong direction on their often lonely way back home. Evocative of the overriding journey to consciousness at the heart of Kristofferson’s life and work, “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33” has become something of a meta-narrative — words for living for all who go in the dark without sight to find that the dark, too, blooms and sings.

ND senior editor Bill Friskics-Warren is the author of a book about soul-making called I’ll Take You There: Pop Music And The Urge For Transcendence.