Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (6 page)

The very word “entwined” is interesting because it conjures another passage from Nietzsche about the ability of the creative process to reconcile day and night, life and death—or the world views of a willowy blond Canadian and a black man from Watts: “My world has just become perfect, midnight is also noonday, pain is also joy, a curse is also a blessing, the night is also a sun,” reads Nietzsche's “Intoxicated Song” from
Zarathustra
. “You will learn: a wise man is also a fool. Did you ever say yes to one joy? O my friends, then you said yes to all woe as well. All things are chained and entwined together, all things are in love.”
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If there is one truism to extract from the
Mingus
sessions, it's that opposites do attract—and often result in surprising creative chemistry. The mother of all binaries is life versus death. It informs every level of our existence. It has perplexed philosophers for millennia and propelled the first shoots of psychoanalytic theory. Once Sigmund Freud got over his fixation on the libido as the central force shaping human behaviour, he wrote
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920) in the hope of explaining certain destructive neuroses and the desires of some victims to repeat unpleasant and even death-affirming experiences. He came up with an earth-shattering revelation: the urge to repeat such experiences comes from a desire to return to “an earlier state of things,” which in turn suggests a state of “non-being,” or death. Once we recognize death as an undeniable reality, the only way we can regain any sense of control is to steer the car over the railing—or at least feel like we are. Freud had a hard time reconciling the death wish theory and admitted he may have “gone astray” in his desire to understand this human contravention of the natural law. But he stuck with it, and balanced it against the life wish (and all our desire for pleasure) to come up with the creative dynamo that defines the psyche: “Eros vs. Thanatos”—Life vs. Death.

In Freud's observation, the creative impulse allows us to form bridges between these two states in order to soothe ourselves. In his famous example, he saw his grandson drop a wheel on a string from his crib and pull it back up again, saying the words (primitively in German) “
fort
” (gone) and “
da
” (there). The game allowed the child to reconcile separation anxiety by playing out a drama of lost and found in his own mind. He could make the wheel appear and disappear at his whim—thereby giving him an illusion of control over the negative force of “gone.” As Ellen Levine puts it in her book
Tending the Fire
, Freud believed that “the basic tension of organic existence is between the regressive force of the death instincts and the progressive force of the life instincts.” In the process, he redefined the creative act, and all fantasy, as an almost backward way of gaining a better grasp of reality. He didn't win a lot of friends with this suggestion, even though most psychologists now agree the fort-da game is part of “normal development.”
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At the time, his peers felt the constant wrangling between Eros and Thanatos was an untenable equation. Moreover, they felt
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
was too abstract and non-clinical—an anomaly for the famed clinician. Quite ironically, they rejected what is largely considered to be Freud's most creative essay dedicated to creativity itself. He held fast to his belief, despite the naysaying, because he felt what he had written resonated on a deeper level that defied empirical proof. And in doing so, he changed the dimensions of the entire psychoanalytic endeavour, which now has plenty of time for Freud's life-death struggle as the central creative spindle that gives our lives meaning.

Mitchell remembers the flight from North Battleford to the polio ward of St. Paul's Hospital in Saskatoon. It was October 1953, and Mitchell was nine years old. She had collapsed that morning, unable to walk. The day before, she looked in the mirror and noticed the dark rings under her eyes. She looked different. She thought, “You look like a woman today.” Mitchell still remembers what she was wearing: “grey pegged slacks, a dark gingham blouse and a blue sweater.” Not only does this prove a particular brand of self-awareness but it also suggests how deeply the memory of sickness etched itself into Mitchell's young mind. The comment “You look like a woman today” also hints at an early level of separation between her inner self and the reflection she saw in the mirror. Her use of “you” points to a schism—and proves Mitchell was already standing outside herself, watching her personal evolution from a subjective—potentially creative—place. The face that looked back at her was changed, and she interpreted it as being “a woman,” a grown-up. Yet this empowerment was betrayed the next day when she couldn't stand up. As she watched the ground beneath her fall away on the plane ride, she thought it resembled “topaz brooches on the black velvet land,” she would later say. “Or something cornball like that.”
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Her moments of creative inspiration would continue, even in the hospital. Her descriptions of the polio ward conjure Little Nell in
Bleak House
. The sound of wheezing, squeezing machines echoed through the sterile hallways. Mitchell remembers being wheeled past the room with the iron lungs and seeing little heads popping out from the gigantic metallic cocoons. Once the disease reaches the lungs, constant ventilation is required—otherwise it's a fast death. And many kids did die—more than three thousand from poliomyelitis in the U.S. alone. Mitchell remembers the nuns carrying cauldrons filled with scalding hot towels they would place on her body, blistering her skin. “The heat was meant to do something to the muscles,” she said. “The disease only rampages for two weeks and then you're left with the disaster. I was unable to walk or stand. I was train-wrecked. My spine looked like the freeway after an earthquake. An adult male doctor could put two fists under the arch of my back.”
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For weeks, Mitchell would be forced to face the very real possibility she might never walk again. To cope with the crisis, she sang, painted, looked at the little Christmas tree her mother brought her, and prayed to no particular god, or maybe no god at all. She can't remember. She thinks she prayed to the dwarf conifer. Whatever she was doing, it worked. Despite a significant curvature to her spine, Mitchell ditched the crutches and the corrective shoes and pushed forward, one foot in front of the other, with a stubbornness that marks her still. “I walked. I went home for Christmas,” she says. “So polio, in a way, germinated an inner life and a sense of the mystic. It was mystical to come back from that disease.”
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Two years before Mitchell made the flight from North Battleford to Saskatoon, a kid from Omemee, Ontario, named Neil Young discovered he couldn't touch his chin to his chest. He was six years old and feverish. The local doctor was all too aware of what it probably was and sent Young to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Splayed out in the back seat of the family car for the ninety-mile trip, Young wore a mask and hugged the toy train his father had given him that morning. Six days later, little Neil was back home—skinny and unable to walk properly. Apparently, the moment he saw his family, the first words he uttered were: “I didn't die, did I?”
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Young's early confrontation with death defined the rest of his life. It changed him physically, rendering him “fragile and delicate” at a time in a boy's life when toughness and athleticism are key ingredients to masculinity. “His legs were like toothpicks, and one day I just asked him [if he'd suffered from polio],” Young's friend Donna Port told biographer Jimmy McDonough, recalling a conversation with the adult Young. “The look of terror gave me the answer. Then it just flowed out. He was wrapped up in a blanket at the time, crying. It was a huge emotional scar to him. We talked about how cruel kids are when you're growing up. It explained a lot.”
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The polio infection also stunted his sense of belonging and made him feel like an outsider for most of his life. By the same token, it nurtured his creative drive. Young was forced, quite literally, to use muscles he never would have used before. He says he's ambidextrous because the polio paralyzed his dominant left side and forced him to use his right hand, ensuring he could reap the most from both the logical left side of his brain and the creative right side. More importantly, he discovered that the pain of being an outsider could be assuaged by the mere act of creating and being surrounded by creative people.

“I always liked building things,” Young told McDonough. “I like having crews working, stuff going on. Creativity. People working and getting paid and creating something—feeling good about what they're doing.”
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From a purely pragmatic perspective, polio also made Young incredibly stubborn. “When Neil makes up his mind he's going to do somethin', he does, y'know—and nothing could stop him,” his mother, Edna “Rassy” Young, told McDonough.
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Joni Mitchell clearly saw a reflection of herself in the kid from Omemee. They met for the first time in 1964, at a coffee house just outside Winnipeg called the Fourth Dimension. “Polio survivors—Neil Young is another one—are a really stubborn bunch of people,” Mitchell told McDonough. “Neil and I have a lot in common: Canadian, Scorpios, polio in the same epidemic struck the same parts of our body; and we both have a black sense of humour: Typical Canadians.”
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Mitchell and Young orbited each other from that moment on. Both eventually headed to Toronto, what Mitchell calls a “wannabe city,” in search of folk fame and fortune. They hung out in the same haunts and hovels, and both were looking for an open door to the U.S. This proved difficult for both artists, but Mitchell negotiated it through her marriage to Chuck Mitchell. Young says his earliest performances in the States were probably the result of Joni and Chuck. Later, Mitchell and Young shared a manager in Elliot Roberts, a business relationship with David Geffen, and a friendship with Graham Nash. For Mitchell, the connection with Nash was largely romantic. For Young, it was creative, as the eventual formation of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young would prove.

From the outside, and certainly to fans of the era, Young and Mitchell became key pieces in a sprawling folk-pop-rock musical puzzle that was quickly redefining the very essence of youth culture. Yet, according to Elliot Roberts, who watched the entire scene unfold from the front row, Young remained an outsider. “Neil never dealt with anyone... he will go a year without talking to you, 'cause he doesn't initiate phone calls,” Roberts told Jimmy McDonough. “Even then, you knew he was his own person. Neil didn't hang with the band [at this point in time Buffalo Springfield], wasn't friendly with the band, wasn't nice to the band—'cause they weren't cooperating with him. They were always afraid of Neil. He had this vibe like Clint Eastwood,” says Roberts in the Young biography. “He was like death.”
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If you look into Neil Young's eyes, you can feel the stark edges of the existential void, and it pierces a tiny hole right through you, somewhere near your solar plexus. The first time I met his spacey brown gaze, I thought this shiver was the result of feeling star-struck. But the second time, at the Sundance Film Festival for the release of Jonathan Demme's concert film
Heart of Gold
, I knew it was something different. Young had just emerged from his second great stare-down with the Grim Reaper in the wake of an emergency brain aneurysm operation. The chill was with him still. I asked him if the recent near-death experience spurred his creativity. He gave me a glance that spoke a silent “duh,” stared at me for about twenty seconds, and didn't answer.

Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Charles Mingus have all been described as being different—to the point of being “alien.” In fact, the descriptive pops up in regards to great creators quite frequently. Oscar Wilde's epitaph carries the stanza: “And alien tears will fill for him / Pity's long-broken urn / For his mourners will be outcast men, / And outcasts always mourn.” On a more literal—but far less credible—note, Leonardo da Vinci and Beethoven have been labelled “alien spies” by the conspiracy theorists and the late-night radio hosts who cater to their collective paranoia.

I think this is a tad insane, but understanding the symbolic importance of UFOs and the “alien presence on Earth” was a subject that obsessed none other than Carl Jung. “In the visionary mode, the creative person is more conscious of an ‘alien' will, or intention beyond his comprehension—a detached portion of the psyche that leads an independent life,” he says.
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Fascinated by the collection of anecdotal data about alien visitations in the advent of the atomic age, Jung started collecting stories about alien sightings as early as 1946. “I'm puzzled to death about these phenomena, because I haven't been able yet to make out with sufficient certainty whether the whole thing is a rumor with concomitant singular and mass hallucination, or a downright fact,” Jung wrote in a letter to a friend in 1951. By 1959, he published the short book
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky
. As the title suggests, the Swiss psychologist wasn't writing a proof of such phenomena but a treatise on why we seem to create mass myths. He concluded that alien sightings were examples of synchronicity where “external events mirror internal psychic states.” He also suggested that the cult surrounding alien lore “may be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to fear of the apparently insoluble political situation in the world that may lead at any moment to catastrophe. At such times eyes turn heavenwards in search of help, and miraculous forebodings of a threatening or consoling nature appear from on high.”
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Before technology gave us the capacity to imagine shiny flying discs, human beings saw dragons, gods, angels, and other inexplicable beings in the skies that they assumed to be gods.