After years of having no particular focus, I have decided that The Middle-Aged Ingenue blog site’s main concentration should be my first love – entertainment. Film, television, books, music. I’m reposting this as an example, a transitional piece. I wrote this in 2014.

How a 22-year-old song caught me off guard and catapulted me into the existential ether.

Two pieces of art that best represent my tumultuous transition from youth to adulthood are Toad The Wet Sprocket’s achingly beautiful Dulcinea and R.E.M.’s masterwork Automatic For The People.  I lived and breathed those albums in the early 1990s.  Both became a part of my consciousness, of my very being.  They imbued my brain cells, my heart, my essence, and reside in my soul to this day.  These albums told my story. They spoke to, confronted, and comforted me during a time when my life was in a difficult but necessary period of uncertainty and upheaval.

Automatic For The People is not merely an album but a song cycle about youth, nostalgia, loneliness, joy, unfulfilled promise, and acceptance.  So profound are Stipes’ lyrics that they have been compared to the works of John Keats.  Haunting and painfully beautiful.  Soulful and intuitive.  Ultimately hopeful.

I heard a snippet of Find the River on a film soundtrack the other night. I hadn’t heard the song in years. It completely knocked me into a fugue state – set me adrift in the existential ether.  I became obsessed, as I sometimes do with music – with the lyrics, the musical structure, and the mystery of how the coalescence of those elements creates such beauty. I played the song over and over.  I sang along, admittedly through tears.  I analyzed the lyrics.  But this time, from a distance of over 20 years.  I became reacquainted with that anxious, aimless, confused girl.  She is indwelt in me.

She is still trying to find the river.

When Find The River was first written, it was said that Michael Stipe wrote the lyrics as an ode to River Phoenix. Scholars have compared the lyrics to To Autumn.  The Phoenix story may or may not be true, but that doesn’t really matter.  As with any sublime work of art,  it transcends simple interpretation.  Experiencing the song as a woman who possesses a little more of the maturity, enlightenment, and wisdom that comes with age,  it touches my psyche on a more intricate level now.  A level of discernment. A spiritual place.

The lyrics are poetry, yes, and ambiguous in a resplendent way. Find The River captures the sense memory of youth;  the beauty and tragedy of experience.  The pain of loss.  The joy of fulfillment.  The complexity and unpredictability of life and the eventual acquiescence that comes with having no choice but to move forward.  Lesson learned and lessons taught.   Disappointment, promise, and hope.  A completed cycle.  A full circle with light years to go.

All of this is coming your way.

I hope it touches your heart as well.