by Emily Pulfer-Terino
Writing, I compose myself. To learn what’s on my mind, I write. My self is made of questions and reflections, poses and expressions. Words, tones and pitches. Gestures of paint.
*
The more I know myself, the more I understand there is no self. Each deepening, part of a pair of solaces. Both sides of one conundrum.
*
I gaze into Joni Mitchell’s self-portraits as into pools of consciousness. On the cover of her early album, Clouds, the subject is the deep pool of her gaze. Her eyes themselves are flame-blue, subterranean in concave sockets above a convex flush of cheeks. Face framed by a fringe of bangs. Red prairie lily held near her lips, bloomed open like her flame of voice. Wide orange world yawning all around her. Her gouache gaze layered through a viewer’s gaze. Clouds imagined and seen through to.
*
Before I’d heard it in her voice, Joni’s “Both Sides Now” came to me as sheet music from a middle school teacher, her choice for my first solo. How profound I found those compounding dualities about clouds, about love and life. Heavy stuff. But figures in the lyrics are so light, sweet as spun sugar, borderline maudlin. I loved the dreamy, incantatory “rows and flows of angel hair.” The fantastical loft of “ice cream castles,” their location simply “air.” And the wondrous proposition of “feather canyons” I longed myself into. Practicing my solo, I agreed with Joni that “I (also) really don’t know love at all.” But my mother loved my singing and wept wildly, unconsolably, when she heard my performance of “Both Sides Now” in that dim and dusty auditorium. I realized I did know my mother’s love. I both bristled and swooned in its flood.
*
From my mother’s record collection, I remember only Clouds. Dusting iridescent grooves with what looked like a chalkboard eraser from my high school. Recall the turntable, square as a typewriter. And the turning of Clouds, over and over, for what became an entire indelible era.
*
That painting, Joni explains, was “done from a mirror over a period of a couple of weeks….a face changes according to sleep and the tension of the day or lack of tension…over a period of two weeks it was a general representation of the thickness and thinness of my face.”
*
The turntable was in the living room. What a name for that place! The living room was a mass of stacked trash, magazines, teetering heaps of hoard. I’d sit in the one accessible corner of the loveseat otherwise piled with papers. Dozens of old, faux-pearl hat pins pierced my mother’s lists and notes and fragments of newsprint, fastening them to the loveseat’s back. So I’d sit forward in a pose of attention, attending to Joni’s singing, breathing, singing along. Scent of mold and shimmer of dust in sun. The record turning. Daylight deepening.
*
Naturally, my favorite song from the album was “Both Sides Now.” Singing, I had embodied it. Listening, I was lulled into its plaintive meditation. It begins regarding the beauty of clouds, then noting “now they only block the sun”. The first refrain reflects:
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s clouds’ illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all
And it continues exploring love; “moons and Junes and ferris wheels” turn to “another show.” Then life with its “dreams and schemes” and old friends who “say I’ve changed.” Her singing this on Clouds, in sweeping soprano lilts and trills and swift falsetto detours, astonishes a listener with brightness, youth, candor, luminosity.
*
The song is about both seeming knowing and absolute unknowing. Signs and symbols inflect so that you think you understand the world and yourself in it. After some time, you realize you don’t.
*
I started smoking a few years after my first solo. And I started writing poetry in earnest. Drifting like a cloud from home to home, scrapping for myself, stashing cash for college, worrying for my mother. Playing guitar and singing in a deepening register. Working at a store that sold crystals and tarot cards and took photos of people’s rainbow clouds of aura.
*
Recorded in 2000, Both Sides Now is the name of Joni Mitchell’s 17th studio album. How deep and rich the singing is throughout, the instruments orchestral. Her singing feels less solo in those realms of space myriad instruments make. Her voice phrases differently than it did on Clouds in 1969. Here, she engages pauses, makes ellipses for a listener to dream into. Tone no longer bright and springy, rather deep as resin. Lyrics sung here do not signify naïveté, but, instead, deep knowing. Phrasing is sculptural, wringing meaning from her words. Again, friends “tell me that I’ve changed.” A rogue clarinet directs attention both deeper into and outwards from what her singing tells us, trickster counterpoint. Dusky vibrato, tremulous on that last, dual utterance: “I really don’t know life, I really don’t know life at all.”
*
My own voice is again soprano now that I’ve quit smoking. How I loved cigarettes; smoking itself felt like a kind of art! But now when I sing to myself, which I do throughout the days, I feel my voice reverberate and trill brightly through my torso, neck, and head. Feel it polishing the top of my skull, making luminous the inside of those bones.
*
The subject of the painting is Joni’s evasive gaze amidst gorgeous plumes of cigarette smoke on the cover of Both Sides Now. The painter’s hand, her own, is heavy here in the periphery, in the smoke, the crumpled sleeve of her wool coat, the ash tray and red wine, the tendons of that hand she holds to her temple with a smoldering cigarette aloft. Her countenance is hard to parse: resigned? dreaming? deep in inspired thought? Either way, it gestures to the architecture of her skull.
*
I think about this notion of mistaking the finger for the moon: Buddha points skyward to direct one towards enlightenment, that single luminosity. But we focus on the pointing, mistaking direction for aim.
*
People’s grief and complaint about her changing voice bewilders me. Lustered, serrated, Joni’s voice inflects ongoingly. Her singing changes how I hear a single sentence. Not hearing, or perhaps not understanding, the astonishing nuance in her later work, I think people mistake the voice for the singing, the finger for the moon.
*
Singing and looking, writing and painting, making music, taking stock – how much time it all takes. And all while nothing can be understood; there’s nothing not to know.
Emily Pulfer-Terino is a poet whose work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. She has been a Tennessee Williams Poetry Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has received a fellowship for creative nonfiction at the Vermont Studio Center. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University.
After the Art 