gagablog 62: Thanksgiving and Loneliness

I was so grateful and excited about Gaga's Thanksgiving show with the Muppets and I enjoyed it so much, but even more has happened since then making me thankful and excited that I have not written about it. In my personal life I'm going to see my dad and stepmom and mother-in-law and grandmother for the first time in two and a half years, and on top of that I just got tickets to see Lady Gaga for the first time. She's performed a lot of things, and made a commentary for Artpop, and I still have to catch up on most all of it. The Thanksgiving show was amazing and profound, and I have to comment on it for how it effected me and what it meant to me. It made me super happy to hear Gaga was doing another Thanksgiving special, especially with the Muppets. Her last Thanksgiving special is my favorite entertainment for this holiday, and the Muppets have been like family all my life. Our whole family watched “The Muppet Show” together when I was a kid, I watched Sesame Street all my life, with some breaks, through my teenage years with my little sister, and again with my kids, and I have loved the Muppets in all their movies. I put up a video on youtube with my love of Bert and Ernie singing “Just Dance” and “Beautiful Dirty Rich.” I always connected with the Muppets, especially the way they honored the qualities of sweetness, cooperation, community, creativity, individuality and even weirdness. I probably identify most with Gonzo, Ernie and Telly, and maybe Janice (Janet? Sorry, I'm tired), but with all of them in different ways. There is a certain loneliness, outkast quality to the Muppets, that makes the family they form together, and with their audience, even sweeter. Gaga is the same way, someone tweeted to me that she brings us outcasts together and I agreed that I've often said the same thing. I see it as the spiritual quality of inclusion and love, the kingdom of heaven Jesus spoke about in the parable of the Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to search for the lost one. I see Gaga as a savior figure for taking this to the ends of the world and really representing it for us, and rubbing off on us. I'm so thankful for this and one major part of thanksgiving is expressing thanks, to deity or nature or whatever for providing the goodness of the world. I also have to say that the performances were, as always, amazing and I will have to refrain from gushing about them to make my point. We are also thankful for each other, and this is possibly the most important thing about thanksgiving, togetherness. Feasting and festivities are all about sharing them with family and friends. While for many this and other family holidays are super stressful for dealing with family, and much of the talk in the media is about this, for others the stress of the holiday is from being lonely, either because you can't be with your family and loved ones or because you don't have any. I'm really lucky and thankful to have my own family here, but of course miss my family back home who I have not seen in years, especially on Thanksgivings, my dad's favorite holiday. But I still relate to loneliness because I still experience it often, due to my work and sometimes to my mood. I thought it was really sweet of Gaga to mention loneliness as a theme in the Thanksgiving show, both because it fits with that all-important theme of inclusion she shares with the Muppets, the idea of seeking out the lonely and weird and bringing everyone together, and because it is an issue for so many people on this holiday. Gaga speaks strongly to a lot of people who feel lonely, either separated from their families of “black-sheep” within them, often because of homophobia still in many societies and families. But there are all sorts of reasons to feel weird or outcast and Gaga speaks to many of us, all who listen anyway. When she mentioned she felt lonely it made me sad, of course, though it made me happy that she was taking the moment to relate to lonely people and include us, to bring us out of our loneliness by reminding us how everyone can feel this way but we are together with each other and with Gaga, even in this sad experience of feeling all alone. Like I said I often feel lonely, because I work nights all alone with hardly any contact with others – watching over kids sleeping in a treatment center. I try to reach out to people online and talk, and could not use facebook most of the year and quit doing it, though I never talked to people much there anyway. But I recently got on twitter and have had a few conversations, but so far my experience of twitter seems to highlight loneliness, in a way. So many people talking, or saying things, but not a lot of back and forth, deep conversation. It is the limits of the form, but also how the whole thing caters to a certain kind of expression and a certain level of interaction. I'm so lucky and grateful to my love who soothes me and spends time with me and cares for me, but I have issues from growing up feeling lonely a lot and still spend so much time alone that I can feel it strongly. It's probably also empathic, sensitive, Aquarian nature, etc. But I've “dealt with” loneliness on many levels, including the extreme loneliness of many of the kids who live where I work, some of whom were so abused and neglected as babies and toddlers that they have terrible behavior issues even at ages 4-11, the age we have at my part of work. Hearing that Gaga was lonely at times was touching, and that felt good, but mostly it was sad. She is reaching out to us, though, and teaching us to reach out to each other. When we are lonely the quickest cure, what we want the most, is someone to reach out to us. But often the best way to connect with others when we are lonely is to reach out to someone else. When I got on twitter last night one of the first tweets I saw was someone saying they felt lonely and unloved. I said we are always loved, and when we are alone we are loved by art. I guess I conveyed my meaning, there was a tweet back of appreciation. I meant art always loves us and we can choose to be in love with it. It's often easier, we are inspired a lot, by being in love with someone, like Gaga says “I'm my best when I'm in love with you.” If we have no one around to relate to, we can relate to the spirit of inspiration and creativity, to art, and make something. Making art is a way of connecting to people even into the future. Loneliness itself can be a strong connection to inspiration, especially for music, with as many love songs about longing as being in love. I once wrote a lyric, a year or two before I heard of Lady Gaga, that went “I'm lonely, that's why she gives these songs to me.” Gaga said one of the hardest things was getting injured and having to cancel so much of her tour, but it was at that time that she composed Artpop and we can hear and see how glorious it is. The reason Gaga says she is lonely is because on tour she has to be away from her family and friends. She is on tour for her love of Art, the Holy Spirit of creativity, and what art means and does for people. She loves us by loving art, knowing her art inspires and encourages us and makes us feel love. So she is sacrificing her personal love, time spent with family and friends, to show a greater love for art and the whole world. She is choosing to face and feel lonely at times so that others, millions of others, feel so much less lonely, or feel fulfilled for life when they connect with her or meet her. This is a sacrifice to art and to love, to the world, to us, but it is also an example to us. We can best face loneliness not by ignoring it or acting tough, like we don't need our lovers or friends or family or anyone, but by admitting we do need each other and acting on that. We can allow ourselves to feel lonely in order to get things done to help others, or we can allow ourselves to engage the loneliness of someone else to help them feel better, instead of ignoring them. This is the example that Gaga is showing for us, that the most powerful and successful of us also feels lonely but that the best response for anyone feeling alone is to reach out to others. This is a message for rich people, too, since wealth can really isolate people and insulate them from community, so much they might not notice it except a pain in their soul. Wealth may be the strongest thing to separate people, in fact, as greed is the source of the system that keeps people in strife and basically at odds with one another. Gaga's example to the rich is to embrace humanness and empathy that we all feel alone at times, and to use riches and success to connect with more people and help people more. Gaga's example to all of us is to find our inner artist, writer, singer, whatever and make the most of our true calling, to be in love with art and share it with the world, to be in love with the world through art. This is the greatest success, to make people happy and to help people, to give them what they need, and we can all live up to this better and better. We become our best selves by trying to do the most to help the world. The art we make creates community, between artists and with audiences, and community is a major love we are all missing, we just need more of it. But the more we have, the more we can make, and sometimes we discover in loneliness, with only art, that we have it all. Gaga reached her transformative moment, married the night, when she was at her loneliest, with just her and her bedazzler. We can all do this, for in accepting loneliness we are actually at our strongest, being able to go for a task, create the art only we can make, or being able to reach out to someone feeling lonely, or accept someone reaching out to us. These are all the essence of love, our greatest strength in admitting our common weakness, loneliness, and sharing it with each other, through art or the love of friendship or affection. We experience loneliness in some of the most profound ways as kids, but we all need to overcome it with love, not “toughness.” Toughness is the bullying way out as kids, but becomes the norm in a lot of ways as adults. This is a major problem and one Gaga addresses in her art and what she says to us directly. So many monsters relate to the scene in the Born This Way Ball DVD where she says, in the dressing room, that she still feels like a loser sometimes, like she did in high school. There is a reason why she connects this feeling with school, and a reason we all relate to that, some more than others. We grow up in a society where we all need more community and belonging than we have, but we come to accept the limitations and isolation and keep busy to ignore it, that's a typical American adult way, and many more societies are becoming more this way. I never accepted this and in general did not see many positive examples of “manliness”, besides in artists, mystical men and in my family. I was always happy to be “young-at-heart”, even if that meant admitting to being tenderhearted and wonderous and insecure and imaginative, even if it meant being scared and lonely at times, or making art and music most people find strange. I still feel like a kid even now that my son is 13 and way bigger than me. But one reason our society doesn't take enough actual care for kids, despite our rhetoric, is because we don't want to face that insecurity again, in general, we don't want to have to relate to that difficult time, we just don't want to really think about what kids go through, we just want to keep busy and keep them busy- generally. That's the problem. Gaga is so special and important for focusing on kids, so much of her concern is for kids and so many of the little monsters are actually little. But they are also the wisest kids, as kids tend to be, but can flourish with actual encouragement and love. Gaga gives this to us and we all need it so badly, you can see this in how people respond to her and say she saved and changed their lives. And it is because she faces her own insecurity and loneliness, her own feelings of being an outkast, with art and love, connecting us all. Because we all feel this way, it is the inner child in all of us who can always use more love, and the artists who hold onto that open heart. But the rest of us need to discover our artist, opening our hearts. The worst way to grow up is to “deal with” insecurity by saying “I don't need love or friendship, I'll just work hard and enrich myself.” This is the scrooge way and we all do it a little, more than we should. The best way to deal with it is to accept it and know that others will often feel lonely, too, that it is an opportunity to connect with people, through reaching out personally or if no one is around, through art. We grow the best of ourselves out of the tenderness of remembering we need each other. The good thing about feeling lonely, and even in ideal societies the reason we will still have times of feeling lonely, is we seek out others and hopefully find love. If we are lucky enough to find love and accept it and appreciate it enough, it is the best thing to grow and replace loneliness forever. But even love between two people is best, is what it fully can be, when it leads to the couple doing better for the world. I'm guessing Gaga found her love in Taylor, but I'm still a little worried or concerned. She said all the Artpop songs were real, no fantasy other in the magic of how the music came together, so I guess the “you” who she is in love with is someone for real, the “you” of all her songs, and most of them are love songs, is a real person or people she knows. I guess at least one of them is for Taylor, but I wondered why she did not mention him as someone she missed, but said family and friends. Maybe it is just them keeping their personal life personal and not mentioning each other much when on screen as their public image. I've caught some interviews by Extra or whoever with Taylor and he never seems to stoked to talk about her when they ask. I saw him that morning at the Thanksgiving parade and he said he was thankful for family and friends but did not mention her. Maybe monsters who pay closer attention expect this, please tell me, I seem to recall her saying she would not talk about her personal, love life. But it just seemed sad that with as many people who would be so grateful to be with her that he could not say something about being thankful for her, to connect with all the people who are thankful to get to love her from however far away and wish that they, that we all, could be closer. As “Gypsy” finishes in the background I wonder if it is someone she will be in love with for life, if it is someone mystical or she hasn't met yet, the Shaggy Man of Oz – if it is about finding the lover to travel the world with (take me!), or if it is about being a traveller in love with the world, as the countries at the end suggest. I need to listen to her commentary, but I have an idea. This was, again, supposed to be a “short one”, and I think I have one more longish gagablog in me about abundance, US/Iran, Mandela, liberation, and Art as the Holy Spirit and Artpop as the Holy Spirit, carbonated and sparkling. And maybe about Christmas, Gaga's Christmas iconography is so hot and festive. But after that I think I will try to make them shorter, maybe a commentary on each of the Artpop songs, then another one on each after I hear her commentary. Please let me know what you think, I'd love to talk about this stuff more with anyone, and while I keep writing these to put the ideas out there for any magical effect, the magic of conversation would be awesome. Thanks for reading and sharing! I'm so inspired especially by Artpop that I will be doing more drawings and music soon and can't wait to share them with everyone. Paws up, love each other, Artrave for Christmas, and Happy Holidays!