He Tried to Do His Best

Today a line from a Neil Young song that I hadn't heard for years flitted across my mind.  The song, "Tired Eyes," is from one of Young's most despairing albums, Tonight's the Night, and is about a cocaine deal gone horribly wrong.  You can either love the song or hate it, just as you can either giggle at or take very seriously Young's delivery of it as a spoken narrative over the accompaniment of his band, rather in the style of nineteenth-century romantic melodrama. 

The line that I remembered was the recurring: "He tried to do his best, but he could not."  It struck me as a simple, sad assessment of the situation of fallen man, and at the same time a sort of mysterious tautology:  if the subject of the song tried to do his best (and it's safe to assume that, since Young suggests that he is a "loser" and a "heavy doper," his personal best was of a rather low standard), then why couldn't he even manage that much?  Well, that is the rub.

Since starting this blog, I have been lambasted, both publicly in the combox and in private communications, for exactly the pitiful dilemma of the poor loser in "Tired Eyes":  I tried to do my best, but I could not.  It seemed to me that my readers who were young orthodox Catholics faulted me particularly heavily for my failures and sins.  One woman made it clear, in a comment deploring my sinfulness and the grief that resulted, that she was in no way as sinful as I was, and it was also clear that she expected never to be.  This strikes me as a very precarious attitude.  Saint Peter wrote:  "Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." Those who believe that that someone is always going to be one of the losers and heavy dopers, or one of the reckless young women starved for love who lacked Catholic formation and diligent parental guidance, are often proven fearfully wrong.  Saint Paul's admonishment to the Philippians to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, after all, applies to us too, and not just to those of us who have been mercifully kept free (kept free, I might add, by the grace of God, and not by their own merits) from serious sin.

We should pray for ourselves, lest we fall into the trap that is laid for us everywhere, and also for everyone else, especially those we're quickest to condemn for trying to do their best but falling pathetically short.  Saint Ephrem the Syrian is supposed to have said, "Be kind to everyone you meet, for everyone is fighting a great battle."  We are fighting it everywhere, and more than we know.

Music and Memory, Part 2: Neil Young

I had a friend long ago who once said that she wished Neil Young were her dad. While such a wish strikes me as misguided at best, my own opinion about Young has progressed from indifference to a respect that borders on awe. I first discovered his music while babysitting for hippies in the late 1970s. At that time, I was more attracted by the gorgeous harmonizing of his colleagues Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Young's quasi-tuneless, mournful, boyishly fragile voice and alternately morose and bitter songwriting seemed to me hallmarks of guy music, which didn't interest me as a rule; I preferred Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and Phoebe Snow. But I recall riding on a city bus around that time and witnessing an older teen vandalizing the seat-back ahead of her with the iconic words: "Oh to live on sugar mountain, with the barkers and the colored balloons." The pathos of this scene touched and unnerved me,leaving me wondering if the adulthood I so longed for would leave me with a broken sense of longing (it has).

As a professional longhair with a limited amount of spare time, I'm pretty well out of touch with current pop culture, and I haven't heard Young's latest two albums. However, the shaky voice, seemingly without overtones, and the despairing songs of the 1970s-era Neil Young are so full of human loneliness and a kind of existential resignation to the uncontrollable strangeness and suffering of life that they resonate powerfully in my heart and memory.