Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (21 page)

Yet Mitchell identifies with Nietzsche. She sees a reflection of herself in his struggle for health, as well as his insomnia. “I believe convalescence in bed develops a strong inner life in a young child. I think it solidified me as an independent thinker,” she told Bill Flanagan in
Vanity Fair
, “Nietzsche was a convalescent.” And, like Zarathustra, Mitchell calls herself an insomniac: “I'm trained to go to bed at 7 in the morning, which is ten o'clock on the East Coast. I'm nocturnal, and after midnight the phones stop ringing and I contemplate, whatever.” Zarathustra, in a metaphorical take on creative awakening, says “stay awake in order to sleep well.”
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Given the stigma surrounding Nietzsche's work, it's rather surprising that Mitchell would have regarded the supposed madman as a mentor. But as we've seen, Mitchell defied expectation—a trait she credits to none other than Nietzsche. So let's take a look at how this creative relationship came to be—and how a flaxen-haired prairie girl found herself knee-deep in the philosophy of a syphilitic nihilist.

According to Mitchell, her first brush with Nietzsche was at Queen Elizabeth Public School, circa 1954. She had just moved from the hamlet of North Battleford to the big city of Saskatoon, where she'd already established an identity as the school artist. “I was hanging up pictures for a parent/teacher day in the hallway,” she told the BBC's Mary Black in 1999, “when a good-looking Australian came up to me and said, ‘You like to paint?' I said, ‘Yes.' He said to me, ‘If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words. I'll see you next year.'”
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The Aussie with the athletic build was Arthur Kratzman, a former track star with a picaresque gold tooth. He had moved to Canada without the right teaching credentials, for which Mitchell says they tried to punish him by sending him to teach on First Nations reserves. But that turned out to be a great joy for Kratzman, who happened to be reading Nietzsche over the course of his exile. “You know... to send a teacher to the Indian reservations in Saskatchewan was like being banished to Siberia. But he took to it with a relish and he was a very, very soulful man. He'd been a racing partner to the great gold-medal-winning racer Johnny somebody-or-other,
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so he was a really good runner. And he was a teacher-maker and a writer-maker and an athlete-maker,” said Mitchell, picking up the same phraseology she's used to describe Nietzsche. “He said, you know, ‘I'm not going to teach it to you. I'm going to cram you in the last two weeks. You'll all pass with flying colors. I'm going to teach you what I know.'”

When it came time to hand in her first poetry assignment to Mr. Kratzman, she was desperate to impress her new hero. She tried to assume a more sophisticated persona and decided to lift a few words from the family's stack of
Reader's Digest
magazines for her poem about stallions. She really thought she'd outdone herself with the line: “equine statues bathed in silver light.” But when she got her paper back, it was drenched in red ink. “For an eleven-year-old... it was quite a precocious poem,” says Mitchell. “He circled it all over ‘cliché, cliché,' you know, ‘good adjective,' you know, ‘you've used this adjective,' ‘cliché,' and he marked me harder than I think American college professors mark at this point—at [the age of] eleven,” she says. “He said to me, ‘How many times did you see
Black Beauty?'
I said, ‘Once.' ‘What do you know about horses?' I said, ‘Well, I go riding at [the stockyard] on the weekends, you know, whenever I can. I like horses.' And he said, ‘Well, the things that you've told me that you've done on other weekends are more interesting than this... ‘Write in your own blood,' he told me. ‘Write in your own blood,' which is Nietzsche, I found out later.”

It is Nietzsche, and it's from
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, Mitchell's “bible”: “Of all writings I love only that which is written in blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.”
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The sanguine criticism pierced Mitchell's creative skin to the bone, because she not only thanks Mr. Kratzman on the liner notes of her debut album
Song to a Seagull
—“This album is dedicated to Mr. Kratzman who taught me to love words”—but she also tells this anecdote more than any other, pulling it from her pocket whenever an interviewer asks about her insistence on originality.

Chronologically, the next reference to
Zarathustra
comes just after she met David Crosby in Coconut Grove. We already know she and the ex-Byrd nested sexually for a brief stint, but in order to consummate his love for Mitchell, Crosby felt the noble need to ditch his then-squeeze, Christine Hinton.

Hinton was entirely dedicated to Crosby. She not only rolled his joints; she took him back after his affair with Mitchell hit the skids. Tragically, they would not be together for long because Hinton died in a car accident shortly after the reunion. According to Sheila Weller in
Girls Like Us
, Hinton was taking a sick cat to the vet with a friend on September 30, 1969—the same day the debut album
Crosby, Stills & Nash
went gold. The friend in the passenger seat, Barbara Langer, had the cat wrapped in a blanket, but just as they entered the freeway, the cat got loose and jumped on Hinton, and she swerved into the oncoming lane. She was killed instantly. Her friend survived.

Distraught over the loss, Crosby took his closest friends—including Mitchell and her new beau, Graham Nash—on his yacht, the
Mayan
, for an extended trip to scatter Hinton's ashes at sea. According to Ronee Blakley, who was on the boat with her husband, Bobby Ingram (who introduced Crosby to Mitchell that fateful day at the Gaslight South), she and Mitchell would cover themselves with tanning oil and slide around on the top deck in the choppy seas. They would also listen to music, such as Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf, as well as read together:

“We both found Nietzsche inspiring and would comb through
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
for signifying phrases,” relates Blakley. “Joni was struck by ‘Anything worth writing is worth writing in blood,' which had been her writing teacher Arthur Kratzman's motto, and she was jolted by the passage where Nietzsche was ‘scathing,' as she put it, towards the poets—calling them vain—but then talked about a new breed of poet, ‘the penitent of spirit,' which was what Joni wanted to be.”
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The image of Blakley and Mitchell sliding into the rails like greased eels is a pretty good one, and their choice of reading material speaks nicely to the particular moment. Mitchell was beginning to gain widespread fame in the wake of her debut album and the covers of her songs that were getting huge airplay. She was feeling the burden of popular expectation, and Nietzsche seemed to be offering the young artist a torch-lit path through the dark jungle of creativity.

She sought the Nietzschean glow once more, while on the road with Dylan, as evidenced by her desire to quote
Zarathustra
in the ill-fated movie
Renaldo and Clara
.

Interestingly, the next reference to Mitchell's affection for the tome subtitled
A Book for Everyone and No One
comes up when she talks about Jaco Pastorius, the genius jazz bassist who translated Mitchell's need for spontaneous rhythms through his inspired, thumping fretwork. Pastorius and Mitchell clearly heard the same beat, because their work together on
Hejira
feels effortless. She told Bill Flanagan, “He was one of the few other people I ever met who thought Nietzsche was funny. We used to laugh about
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. Jaco was a good friend. I enjoyed his company.”
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But the relationship heightened Mitchell's awareness of the fame precipice. “As he got on the scene, he kind of went too far over the other way. He used to push his bass up in the mix. Everybody thought it was because he was my new boyfriend!”
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Pastorius died of head injuries suffered in a scuffle with a Florida bouncer in 1987 at the age of 35, but he gave Mitchell the anchor for her new jazz sound on
Hejira
,
Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
, and the live album
Shadows and Light
. His problems with substance abuse, mental illness, and the ego-surge of fame led to his downfall, but they also reaffirmed Mitchell's need to distance herself from the music industry she loathed so much by continuing her experimentation, surrendering her ego to the creative force, and fashioning art with a nod to Nietzsche—sometimes literally.

Because
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
was a significant influence on Joni Mitchell, I believe a brief recap is in order—just so we can see the chalk-mark outline of the journey, and spot the parallels when they appear.

The book opens with Zarathustra emerging from his mountain cave after a ten-year absence from society. You see, he grew weary of the world at thirty and decided to become a hermit. He had lost his faith but eventually realized this loss was actually a great gift because he was now truly free. He could laugh. He could dance. He could do all the things his spirit told him to, without guilt. He wanted others to feel the same happiness, so he decided to leave the cave he shared with his two pets—an eagle (the proudest animal) and a snake (the wisest animal)—and spread his gospel.

He picks his way down the mountainside and soon meets an old saint, who sings to the old god. The saint doesn't have much respect for humankind. “Give them nothing,”
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he cautions Zarathustra, who laughs, because he wants to give them the greatest gift of all: freedom to think for oneself. The saint wanders away clueless, while Zarathustra carries on into the village called the Motley Cow.

Zarathustra is empowered, but when he arrives at the village, the people are not ready for his version of godless freedom and ridicule everything he says. “And now they look at me and laugh. And laughing they still hate me. There is ice in their laughter. Perhaps I have lived too long in the mountains,” says Zarathustra, who decides to laugh it off.
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Original thinkers are always the enemy. He knows this, but soon the crowd's attention is diverted to a tightrope walker, who promptly falls to his death—“a vortex of legs and arms.”
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The dying man blames the Devil for his fall, but Zarathustra tells him, “All you have spoken does not exist: there is no Devil and no Hell.” Confused, the broken acrobat thinks his life has been meaningless, but Zarathustra comforts him, saying, “Not so. You have made danger your calling, there is nothing in that to despise.”
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Before the tightrope walker expires, he thanks Zarathustra for his understanding and the promise of a proper burial.

Shaken by the events of the day, Zarathustra realizes he needs friends—“living ones, not dead companions and corpses... the creator seeks fellow-creators.”
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It's not easy to find kindred souls, and the beaten path won't lead you in the right direction, but Zarathustra finds inspiration watching his animal companions. He sees the eagle and the serpent flying together—the snake curled gently around the eagle's neck in friendly harmony—suggesting wisdom and pride can live side by side.

As Zarathustra's voyage continues, he meets several more characters, all of whom elicit a particular message: a dwarf, a shadow self, the Ugliest Man (who killed God), and the kings and “higher men” who seek enlightenment because their grand egos demand a higher spiritual station than the great unwashed below.

There are times when the journey is too much for Zarathustra and the persistent pain of being misunderstood forces him back to his cave, where he “waits like a sower who has scattered his seed.”
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He's waiting for his theories to find root in the public imagination, but it's no use. “My enemies have grown powerful and have distorted the meaning of my doctrine, so that my dearest ones are ashamed of the gifts I have given.”
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Realizing first-hand communication is the only way to sell the freedom of a godless state, he returns to the people and continues teaching by example.

At the end of the book, the so-called “wise men” end up back at Zarathustra's cave, where they eat a feast, get drunk, and make an ass dance. They've been awakened by Zarathustra's words and are giddy about their new creative freedom, but they make the mistake of worshipping him for his service—which Zarathustra finds distasteful. After all, he spent all that time tearing down the walls of worship; the last thing he wants to become is a god in others' eyes. It would be the ultimate folly.

He reaffirms his original thought: man must save himself, and the only way he can do so is to question every truth he takes for granted—to challenge and chastise his own gods out of love. If he's courageous enough to face the abyss of a godless universe, he has a chance at transcendence, where he can reconcile life and death—being and not being—without resting on the crutch of denial, the afterlife, or all the pretty angels and demons we've learned to defer to when it comes time for ultimate judgement.

Transcendence takes work. Zarathustra identifies three distinct stages of enlightenment on the way to the ultimate state of the “Superman” or “Overman.” The first is the camel, the beast of burden that renounces and is irreverent but dutifully shoulders the weight of humankind and our petty needs. The second is the lion, who overcomes the traditions with his roar of courage. The lion destroys old values because he is strong and fierce, but he cannot recreate the world. For that, you need the third manifestation of man: the one with the eyes of a child who can rediscover innocence in all that is new and recreate the world without raging against it or carrying the burdensome baggage of the old ways.