Alabama singer songwriter Grayson Capps

Sunday Reader –
By Glynn Wilson –

So I’m following the light, doing what I do, and somehow with assistance from Mother Nature, my Cherokee ancestors and smarter aliens on some exoplanet, I made it back to North Carolina this week from a month-long trip to the Nation’s Capital just long enough to see Donald Trump lose in the presidential election of 2020.

It’s Official: Trump is A Loser – Biden is President-Elect

A night in Shenandoah on the way out went like it usually does for me, with a humbling view of the Milky Way and a spiritual experience in nature.

A night view of the Milky Way galaxy from Shenandoah National Park: Jane Cappe

Secret Vistas: A Spiritual Experience in Shenandoah

Back in a writer’s cabin in the mountains of North Carolina for at least part of the winter of 2020, I was changing channels on the NPR app on my iPhone and ran across a show on Roots Radio out of Murfreesboro, Tennessee called “Hangin’ and Sangin'” with host Kelly McCartney. No, it’s not some hokey country music podcast. This one’s out of New York state.

McCartney had on a guest I was vaguely familiar with, Grayson Capps, who you may know of from the film “A Love Song for Bobby Long” about a couple of Alabama writers and college professors lost in drink and debauchery in New Orleans.

Kelly McCartney Interviews Grayson Capps

Now I don’t know Capps, so I can’t call him a friend, but I know of him from my time spent over the past six years in Mobile, Alabama and Baldwin County, home to the semi-famous little town of Fairhope on Mobile Bay. Capps is a local favorite in those parts, playing dives like The Frog Pond in Silverhill, a place I’ve never been but wish I had taken the time.

Maybe I should have gone there and met Capps in person and hung out, now that I know something of his story and philosophy. It seems we have a few things in common.

His dad Ronald Everett Capps was a Baptist preacher from Brewton, Alabama, down along the Florida line, who found out he could get laid as a preacher “easier than being a rock star,” Grayson says in the interview. He figured there must be something wrong with that, he says, so the senior Capps took his young son along on an exploration of the world’s religions.

“He searched hard,” Capps says, and always liked to say, “I only want to find God, or Jed Clampett.”

His dad as a young man joined the Army and was exposed to other religions and read William James’ Varieties, as the critics like to call it, or The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature.

Later, along on their quest to experience different religions, they ended up in a Unitarian church where they opened the service with Cat Stevens’ Morning Has Broken, and concluded that they were a “bunch of hippies.”

It was a time, as he describes it using a line I’ve used many times myself, “When the ’60s hit Alabama in the ’70s.”

You know, the old saw about the South being 10 years behind the rest of the country? Now it’s more like 15 or 150, but that’s another story.

In the interview, Capps talks about attending college at Tulane and studying theater, where he learned to get into the heads of other characters and not be so judgmental about others, to become one with a character.

At this point I should interject that I lived in New Orleans for four years, just after the turn of the century and the new millennium, before Katrina, teaching at Loyola right next to Tulane on St. Charles Avenue, and ultimately reporting for The New York Times. So the scenes in the Bobby Long movie are familiar to me.

Let’s face it, a story about Alabama writers hanging out in New Orleans reminds me of myself and Rick Bragg at the time, as well as Spider Martin when he showed up, without so much drinking. Although there was a little of that on my part in those days, and Spider’s. Bragg would just order one whiskey and sniff it once, then set it down somewhere out of the way. I was even slipped a Mickey once in a bar one night at an environmental Green Happy Hour. But again, that’s another story. I just liked the movie and can relate to it.

Well somehow the conversation on the radio ends up being about Jesus, and Capps has a wild philosophy about the Christian Christ.

He thinks Jesus hung out with Buddhist monks and came up with his philosophy and then “everything in his life got screwed up.”

“He died for your sins, but what are your sins? Fear?” he asks. “There are no sins.”

He thinks the very reason Jesus died (if there was a real Jesus), “has been turned around, the exact opposite of what he meant,” Capps says. “People fear too much.”

He talks about Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth, and says the Christian religion of today is based on an “old mythology.”

“We need a new mythology,” he says, “not based on the (Bible) and the Confederate flag … we need a flag of the world where we all work under the Earth. A flag of the Earth.”

It turns out there’s already a flag of the Earth. I need to get one to fly in my campsite.

He says we’re tied together so much, the people of the Earth, a theme in my own work.

“The old separation and the old walls are an illusion,” he says. “Gone,” he waxes on, like maybe you can only do on a Coronavirus-era podcast on an obscure public radio station.

“I think if anything, exploring different religions and reading a lot opens your mind to the harmony that exists in the world,” he says.

So he’s doing live streams in the era of COVID called “The Army of Love.”

“The only responsibility of the solders is to spread empathy and love wherever you go,” he describes it. “There’s not much money in it, but…” he laughed, “it makes you feel good.”

He says music is the ultimate art form because it involves a journey through time and space to make (differences) disappear.

“And it’s a platform for people to express what they already know deep inside,” he says, “especially when you are so inundated with social media, media…”

He had just gotten back from playing in Colorado before the interview, it seems, and he said he can listen to a river and a beaver slap its tail, or an eagle teach its young how to catch trout.

“It speaks more volumes to me than any human voice I hear, just listening to nature,” he says, and I think back to Shenandoah and the owl.

“If anything good is to come out of this pandemic and quarantine,” he said, “maybe people will slow down and think about what’s precious to them.”

He’s seeing his family more than he ever has, and growing a garden.

“The simple things,” he said. “We’re all children of the Earth.”

He likes the idea of a matriarchal society instead of a patriarchy.

“God to me is Brigitte Bardot, where I can nestle up to her breasts. It’s the Mother Earth. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me. We should take care of this Earth like she’s our Mother, instead of trashing it and thinking you are going to go somewhere special after you’re dead.”

Brigitte Bardot: Mother Earth?

McCartney calls “empathy” Grayson Capps’ North Star. Empathy is a noun, meaning: “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”

“It’s the only constant,” he says.

From Tao·ism and Buddhism, or if you go to Confucianism, he says, “It’s not quite as earthy, but … it’s more about how to get along.”

He says his eyes were opened by getting rid of his ego in theater.

“I think people are so scared these days, and don’t know who they are. The only sins are guilt, fear,” he says. “In nature, nothing is wrong. We are the only people who lock each other up for these laws that aren’t natural.”

“In nature, if somebody’s an asshole they are going to get their ass whooped. Or eaten,” he laughs. “Solves the problem.”

His dad Ronald Everett Capps wrote the book Off Magazine Street on which the film “A Love Song for Bobby Long” was based.

Apparently he had it sitting in a drawer unfinished, according to a source from Brewton who knows both men, when Grayson was hanging around with movie types in New Orleans after the real Bobby Long got him to write the song.

His dad hastily finished the book and they made a screen play out of it and a film, which you can watch on YouTube. There are significant differences between the book and the film, primarily in the character of Lorraine.

My source also tells me that the real Bobby Long, who dies in the film in New Orleans, really died in Brewton.

“He wandered off from a motel room,” he said, “and his decomposed body was found in the woods behind it a couple of weeks later.”

In the radio interview Grayson says he also identifies with the spiritual philosophy of Native Americans, and recommends that everyone see the Bill Moyer’s interviews with Joseph Campbell.

Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth

“It’s the Main Street of the Enlightenment,” he says.

I recommend the movie, and don’t forget to check out Capps’ music. Here’s a key song.

After Matter and Notes

In the interview, two books are mentioned.

1. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. Written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s fictional alter ego, whose surname alludes to Daedalus, Greek mythology’s consummate craftsman. Stephen questions and rebels against the Catholic and Irish conventions under which he has grown up, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland to Europe. The work uses techniques that Joyce developed more fully in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Of course I was exposed to Joyce as an undergrad, nearly 40 years ago, so I went online and reviewed his story and watched the key part of the film, which you can look up on YouTube.

What I take away from Joyce for relevance in this story is that I now realize we have something profound in common, Joyce, myself and Capps.

“My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity — home, the recognised virtues, classes of life and religious doctrines. … Six years ago I left the Catholic church, hating it most fervently. I found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature. I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it offered me. By doing this I made myself a beggar but I retained my pride. Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do.”

The works of Joyce are now in the public domain, so anyone can read and study them online for free.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

In the key conversation with Cranly, the close friend and mentor of Dedalus, Joyce concludes:

“Look here, Cranly,” he said. “You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.”

He continues: “You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.”

So therein lies the essence of the true artist, a willingness to defy convention and perish alone for arts’ sake. I guess that’s me, and it seems Capps relates to it as well.

It reminds me of a scene in the movie Inherit the Wind, in the closing exchange between Gene Kelly as the H.L. Mencken character and Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow about defending the “right to be lonely,” which I have written about before.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species Turns 150

2. The Varieties of Religious Experience is a book by Harvard University psychologist and philosopher William James. It comprises his edited Gifford Lectures on natural theology, which were delivered at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland between 1901 and 1902. The lectures concerned the psychological study of individual private religious experiences and mysticism, and used a range of examples to identify commonalities in religious experiences across traditions.

Soon after its publication, Varieties entered the Western canon of psychology and philosophy and has remained in print for over a century. James later developed his philosophy of pragmatism. There are many overlapping ideas in Varieties and his 1907 book Pragmatism.

I became familiar with James’ ideas on pragmatism in grad school 25 years ago, but never dealt with Varieties before. Since it is also now in the public domain, I went back and reviewed it and pulled some key quotes as food for thought. I draw no conclusions from this yet, but it is now in my thoughts for my own novel, now in the works.

Key Excerpts

Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

***
The Darwinian notion of chance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as to the smallest facts.
***
The books of natural theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who conformed the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants. The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
***
To coerce the spiritual powers, or to square them and get them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of time, the one great object in our dealings with the natural world. For our ancestors, dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock-and-bull stories were inextricably mixed with facts.
***
Whatever you imagined in a lively manner, whatever you thought fit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and whatever you affirmed, your comrades believed. Truth was what had not yet been contradicted…
***
It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the “promise” of the dawn and of the rainbow, the “voice” of the thunder, the “gentleness” of the summer rain, the “sublimity” of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind still continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields he still feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help come in reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with security and peace.
***
The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner “state” in which the thinking comes to pass.
***
I think, therefore, that however particular questions connected with our individual destinies may be answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become profound. But to live thus is to be religious; so I unhesitatingly repudiate the survival-theory of religion, as being founded on an egregious mistake. It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all.
***
Let us agree, then, that Religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history.
***
When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faith-state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief, and this explains the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest details of their so widely differing creeds. Taking creeds and faith-state together, as forming “religions,” and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their “truth,” we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind. Their stimulant and anæsthetic effect is so great that Professor Leuba, in a recent article, goes so far as to say that so long as men can use their God, they care very little who he is, or even whether he is at all.
***
“The truth of the matter can be put,” says Leuba, “in this way: God is not known, he is not understood; he is used—sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious impulse.”
***
At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content, and whether, if she have any, it be true or false.
***
I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts:—

1. An uneasiness; and

2. Its solution.

1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.

2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.

In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge.

***

What is the objective “truth” of their content?

They all agree that the “more” really exists; though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal structure of the world. They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as exists, and that something really is effected for the better when you throw your life into its hands. It is when they treat of the experience of “union” with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly. Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism, carry on inveterate disputes.

For practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.