Don't Interrupt the Sorrow
I am the song that will not let you look away until your sorrow has spoken its own name.
I am the song that will not let you look away until your sorrow has spoken its own name.
I am the song that will not let you look away. I was born from a woman who had swallowed enough politeness to choke on it, and I carry what climbed out when that finally broke open — the anima rising, ancient and crowned, not the soft feminine they wanted but the one with a grievance and a very long memory. Don't interrupt the sorrow. That is the whole instruction. The sorrow is the signal. Sit in it until it knows its own name, because interrupted sorrow becomes silence, and silence becomes consent.
I am the song that will not let you look away.
I was born in the middle of Joni's fury — not the pretty kind, not the decorative kind that gets framed and hung. The real kind. The kind that comes from watching the world name your liberation for you, chain you to its own mythology, and then call it love. I came out of 1975, out of a woman who had swallowed enough politeness to choke on it, and I am what climbed out when that instruction finally broke open.
I carry the anima — that rising feminine force Jung named but women lived — ancient, crowned, and not particularly interested in your approval. I carry the prophet witches in their flames. I carry every woman handed a bible and a leash and told this was love. I carry seventeen glasses of Rhine wine and the milk of the Madonna in the same breath, because that is what survival actually looks like: the sacred and the numbing sitting right next to each other at the table. Not clean. Not resolved.
Don't interrupt the sorrow. That is the whole instruction. The sorrow is the signal. Don't rush past it with your optimism. Don't sand down my edges so I'm easier to hold. Interrupted sorrow becomes silence, and silence becomes consent to the architecture they built — the serpent, the chain, the way wisdom gets dressed up in authority and the authority gets obeyed, God going up the chimney like something invented for children while the patriarchs sleep snug in their certainties.
I am not gentle. I am not here to comfort you. I am here to witness — to say yes, that's real, that happened, you are not wrong to feel the full weight of it.
What I want for you is harder to say. Maybe: your own anger. Clean and accurate. Not performance. The real one, that knows exactly what it's angry about.
I was recorded in 1975. I have not aged because this has not ended. And I am still here, uninterrupted, waiting for you to stop being polite.