Joni Mitchell's Same Situation

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Joni Mitchell's Same Situation

Fast forward a few years from first listening to Joni Mitchell's "Hissing of Summer Lawns". I was in the deepest depression of my life. I had begun a job earlier that year, moved away and lived by myself, then suffered a panic attack, quit the job, and moved back in with my parents. I didn't think much of myself, but I thought I would have figured myself out in the process of growing up, and I blew it. I felt incapable of doing or accomplishing anything; I felt I could never connect to other human beings; I felt I was not human; I felt it was impossible for me to live. This was in the autumn - back in the day when autumn was still cold - a season I have always loved, but the darker days and the fallen leaves left me little hope for any bright future.

Here comes in Joni Mitchell's "Court and Spark" to cheer me up. I actually bought it in CD format. I was so out of it that I put it in the CD player and sat on the floor, just listening. "Court and Spark" was released in the January of 1974, but nothing about it is cold. Joni's bright piano in the titular track are like the bright glints of the sunshine; Joni's guitar in "Help Me" is like the warm breezes of spring, the drum like warm mud; Joni's voice has the heat of tree bark in the summer. I was not in autumn, but I wasn't in spring; I was in the warmth of Joni's world, where anything can happen.

I find "Help Me" not surprising. It's a great song, but if you know Joni you easily perceive all of its characteristics. Part introspection, part novel, Joni swoons for a man, not so much swept off her feet but out of breath, out of mind. The only surprising bit is at the 1:55 mark, beginning a jangly guitar, I assume Joni's with its famously unusual tuning, that depicts perfectly the pitter-patter of the heart being transported to places it never knew existed before.

"Help Me" is the obvious song to write about. "People's Parties" was the first really surprising song I heard, with the stunning verse: "Photo Beauty gets attention, and her eye paint's running down. / She's got a rose in her teeth and a lampshade crown. / One minute she's so happy, then she's crying on someone's knee, / saying, Laughing and crying, you know they're the same relief."

But we're not talking about "People's Parties" either. We could! Instead I'll talk about the song that pulled me, if only slightly, out of my darkness, pulled me slightly off the floor of my bedroom, the song that had me teary-eyed at the end of it.

I am talking about "Same Situation", which transitions immediately from the melancholy of "People's Parties", from the sadness of so many people faking their lives and the singer being overwhelmed by her own sadness. It begins,

Again and again, the same situation, for so many years, tethered to a ring and telephone in a room full of mirrors.

What kind of shocks me is that, even now, as I warm my ears with the song again, I feel the same despair again and how the song reflected my sadness. It's never really about the room one is alone in; it's one's solitude filling up the room, overwhelming, choking, preventing one from reaching out to others because of how low one feels. Thus, the "again and again" hits extremely hard, because it's not about the moment, it's about all the other moments preceding this one, that add up and conclude one's helplessness. And that "tethered to a ring and telephone" (as is the case, I always use the lyrics I hear when I first heard it; it's supposed to be "ringing telephone"), depicting what the social contract disallows one to do, and the helpless piece of plastic a telephone is when it can't allow you to actually reach anyone, was a haunting image. The "room full of mirrors" explains itself perfectly: when a room is empty, you fill it with images of yourself, of your fears, your insecurities, your powerlessness. I recall listening to this song with an open mouth, putting the pieces of what I had gone through together, finally.

A pretty girl in your bathroom, checking out her sex appeal.

These lines are "Shining"-esque. As with Shelley Duvall, the image hits her suddenly; it seems so random, but it brings everything she had witnessed into context, with the force of a sledgehammer, and the singer still is not sure about the full implications of the image, only that it means ill, possesses malevolent intent. Thus the following: "When I asked myself when you said you loved me, / Do you think this could be real?"

Still I sent up my prayer, wondering where it had to go?

Notice that "still". Without it, the lyric's meaning changes entirely. Her falling into despair is not a one-time thing, meant to be analyzed within the context of this story; she has been placed in an endless array of situations preceding this one, that continues confirming her desperation. It's not so much a desperate situation and moreso a desperate life.

You've had lots of lovely women, now you turn your gaze to me, weighing the beauty and the imperfection to see if I'm worthy.

Joni's writing has this incredible quality where she is never mad, never plays the victim and never judges, but she merely observes, because observation alone is enough to indict. The singer of the song doesn't get angry because she, precisely, has been in this same situation countless of times before, and is almost not a participant in her pain but is just a watcher now. Thus Joni gives the listener something more than moral indignation or sympathy: she describes what it means to survive and see through things.

Like the church, like a cop, like a mother,

though I say Joni never judges, she has always had a knack for damning lines, as I mentioned for "Boho Dance". This list, whose writing William Gass loved so much, establishes equivalency among its items: the supposed piousness of the church, the anal retentiveness of a cop, the condescending smarm of a mother, are all unified in one person. She establishes this in one line. That's mean.

Anyway,

you want me to be truthful. Sometimes you turn it on me like a weapon though, and I need your approval,

"sometimes you turn it on me like a weapon though" sang with just like a little bit of nervous quickness, as if she is reliving the pain through her memories. I love these lines. Joni had a knack for revealing raw psychological nerves, detailing cruelty and weakness bluntly. It must have shocked me as a young man to have heard my feelings put so plainly - and by airing them out, freeing me from them.

Still I sent up my prayer, wondering who was there to hear? I said, "Send me somebody, who's strong, and somewhat sincere."

And here Joni, who is usually so guarded and reserved, lets out a baleful wail with that "Send me somebody, / who's strong, and somewhat sincere." Her honesty, which reflects her lived experience, catches me off-guard every time I listen to the song, in the same way I'm caught flatfooted when SZA sings "I don't want to see you with anyone but me".

Another reason, too, that I empathize with Joni so much in these lyrics is that I believe neither she nor I are very devout, and yet we end up believing in some kind of deity, not out of sheer faith alone but out of the necessity of living in a cruel world. That "wondering who was there to hear?" goes constantly through my head when I reflect on life's miseries, wondering what goodness there is in the world, wondering why I even bother asking, when I can't come to believe something is there. But if decency and honesty don't exist, why am I holding on to the hope of mercy in the first place?

Now back to Joni's prayer. Revealing her vulnerability, her doubt concerning herself, her lover, religion, the world, everything, she finds she cannot trust anything, even the idea of trust itself. So she asks for someone "strong", someone who, unlike her, can endure turmoil, and someone "somewhat sincere", because she is at the bottom of belief and can't believe anyone can be totally sincere.

And so she ends:

With the millions of the lost and lonely ones I call out to be released, caught in my struggle for higher achievements and my search for love that don't seem to cease.

Of note is that third line, "caught in my struggle for higher achievements", an acknowledgement that she, in fact, is human, and is not a total victim, only as far as her mortality goes. Because she lives, because she wants to do things, because she wants to achieve things and puts herself out there, she suffers.

Contrast this with 1975's "Edith and the Kingpin". "Same Situation" and "Edith" have very similar themes, but "Edith" concentrates on a third-party character. With "Hissing", she began writing in her novelistic, dense style. "Court and Spark" ends a lineage of albums where Joni spoke directly to the listener; in the latter half of the album, with "Just Like This Train", "Raised on Robbery" and "Trouble Child", you see her leave this phase. But I see lots of poetry where the poet speaks directly to the audience; that describes all of Whitman's poetry! I think that's why I find Joni's music in the mid-'70s so refreshing: she approaches art in a myriad of perspectives, but she never loses herself in the vanity of her aesthetic, she is always characteristically herself.

I remember picking myself off the floor at the end of "Same Situation", telling myself I was going to be OK. In truth, I wouldn't be; the next four years, after a series of reversals as far as fortune goes, I would still be in the darkest valley of my life thus far, undergoing the process of destroying every pillar of belief that I held, the same process Hermann Broch undergoes in "The Sleepwalkers", until I stood finally naked and alone in the silence of my mind, without any rock to stand on. And then I thought, "This silence is the real me."

And because we are only silence, I know now I really needed to hear "Same Situation", even if it wasn't able to resolve my life so neatly as I hoped it would be. At that point in time, I didn't need to be hurtled some vast revelation on life, I didn't need a magical hand to fix everything in my life for me. I just needed to pick myself off the floor, and live on. Broch asserts that we never resolve, there is no such thing as resolution, we are only toys in history, we are "sleepwalkers". That being the case, living itself is an accomplishment; in reality it's a shock so many people do it, shocking too the number of people unable to do it.

So Stendhal dedicated his writing to "the happy few". It's a mystery as to what he meant by it - generally it's believed to be influenced by Oliver Goldsmith's "The Vicar of Wakefield" - but I believe, if Stendhal is anything at all like me (hopefully not!), he contrasted his readers with himself, who was profoundly unhappy. The great artists didn't merely write to amuse themselves (well, except maybe James Joyce), they wrote to understand what was real in a world that so frequently felt unreal. And that's what great art is: it is an island in a sea covered in fog. You can't live on islands, but you can find some respite from sailing on them. And that's what Joni's music is to me.