by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 Africa Correspondent

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Mputhumi
Ntabeni

If you're convinced of your own despair, you must act as if you did hope after all - or kill yourself. Suffering gives no rights. - Albert Camus

QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - Last week "The man in black," (Johnny Cash) kicked the bucket after 71 years, a great part of which was dedicated to a long successful career in music. He died at Nashville's Baptist Hospital due to complications from diabetes, resulting in respiratory failure according to his manager Lou Robin. He was born in 1932 in Kingsland, Arkansas. He helped with picking cotton in the family farm at New Deal in Arkansas. His first taste with deep suffering was when he was 12. His brother, Jack, 14, died in an accident while sawing trees. The experience haunted him all his life. He later suggested the tragedy was responsible for the raw haunting notes in his music.

To those who don't know it, his music is known for arousing pernickety emotions. It's country music steeped on folk prosiness that conveys and penetrates to the essential nature of things. He became a cultural icon, bridging the worlds of rock and country into a meeting point where they engaged in political concerns. His raw emotional honesty was always on the side of the underdog.

With the likes of Bob Dylan, Cash popularised what later became known as "protest folk." His music was not as chirpy as Bob Dylan's. It was heightened by lyricism, that baritone voice, and the calming effects of quiet wisdom. Compared to Leonard Cohen's frugal music of erotic sadism he is a saint but suffers in depth for it. All three of them though share a pleasing quality of non-decorative, life-like music that's intolerant of false notes. Their music became a contemplation of life from the perspective of the underdog. Perhaps the former president of the USA, Bill Clinton, when presenting the Lifetime Achievement Award to Johnny Cash said it best:

"From the heartland of America, Johnny Cash sang for the people who are the heart of America"

We shall'let the whistle blow' in commemoration of Johnny Cash's life. I have a feeling he would have preferred it so. A life fully lived needs no mourning. We only mourn lives that never try to reach their potential. Lives that prefer to err on the cowardly side, wasted lives. It takes a lot of courage to reject the safe rewards of career, for instance, for the hazards of talent-genius that wishes to give its best. It takes a lot to turn away from dull success for the struggles and disappointments of the internal fund. To brave the deep, as they say, and escape the boredom of respectability. To stand alone in order to master one's fate with a staggering idea of one's own worth. To be a stranger even to the community you choose as your own. Johnny Cash's life came across as such. Like most of us, he carried within himself a place of his own exile.

There was a quality of self-containedness and irony about his music. It came with an attitude he termed'raising Cain,' which, I think by that he meant rebellion. People who have a genuine streak of melancholy in them, like Johnny Cash, cannot help swinging on the pendulum of deep emotions. Back and forth from unemotional devotions to pleasing irreverence that borders on blasphemy. There was a dignified pathos about him, an underlying disillusion that showed itself in severe kindness,'the face of Jesus in my soup.'

Those who know Johnny Cash's songs would not miss his furious sympathy for country life, his precarious balance between sneering irritability with modern life and magnanimous generosity for the outcasts. And the stoical acceptance of destiny he championed. Listening to his song, "The Mercy Seat," you begin to understand with what dignity noble people accept even the idea of their defeat. It takes a fully developed man to enter the killing brightness of light with a challenging hint of indestructibility:

And the mercy seat is glowing,
And like a moth that tries to enter the bright eye,
I go shuffling out of life just to hide in death a while ...
And I'm yearning to be done with this twisting of the truth.

So goes the music story of'the man in black' with wonderful occasional attacks on pompous pretensions and condescension toward the life of material wealth and its rubbishy influences. It's done in the song: "I'm Doing Alright for Country Trash." The reasoning might be fatuous but you'll love the boldness of the approach. Those who were born with difficult opportunities feel exonerated when listening to it. They also feel a delayed sense of justice in the reminder that "we'll all be equal under the ground."

Most of Johnny Cash's songs relish the quick puncturing of pomposity, and shun superficial pleasures. As much as they're full of what we may call Christian spirituality I doubt if we can call him a Christian singer pratiquante et croyante. He was a Christian singer of moments. This probably saved him as an artist. Most people who call themselves religious artists tend to end up moralists cloyingly trying to use art for the purpose of proselytising. What's known as the'Christian Period' of Bob Dylan's singing career testifies to that. Most spiritual singers become censorious and fail the art. This is worse in our times where Jacobinism and the worst of Calvinism are rearing their ugly heads again; when the religious fundamentalists are murdering God in the hearts of ordinary people.

Johnny Cash's spirituality came from the influence of his wife June whom he credited for bringing a lot of stability to his life. It also came from his deeply felt sense of sin; a sense of sin always causes a temptation to despair on lesser souls, and humility on greater good ones. As a melancholic, he vacillated between the two. He was 'a tired fugitive from vanquished Troy' with a streak of cynicism that compelled him to reserve the right to doubt in whatever he undertook. He lacked the hope of the religious-minded. Hope that's too illusive, too stochastic. He did not trust in it. Which is why perhaps he trusted more on the Maximian pleasures, of growing cabbages with their surprising peacefulness that succours the mind. Montaigne was his chief priest.

There also was the occasional dry and grisly humour about him. You'll find it at its best in the song: "The Man who Couldn't Cry." Some of the lines go like: ... Left dead by a whore ... Went to heaven, located his dog...His wife died of stretch marks ... and so on.

Let his imitators feed on the remains.