Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep

I was on the verge of tears when Oh, Mary Don't You Weep started singing in my head. Here's what happened: I ran into my friend Carson on the internet in these wee hours. In body and bone he's in Palestine -- Ramallah (a city whose name, he points out, means something like 'heights of God' -- I get to thinking of a dusty Mount Olympus shrugging it's shoulders and reaching up toward a power higher than itself) to be exact. He's a Quaker and will be in Ramallah for a year, teaching English at a Friends' School. Anyway, I'm reading these pictures he's sent me -- faraway hills obscured in haze, an Israeli settlement crisp in the nearer distance, taxis driving erratic like my memories of Beirut, breaking bread with olives plucked fresh from a tree overhanging overhead as a pair of doves fly by, the super-cinematic, saturated with chunks of my memory -- dust and gasoline coating the inside of my nose till I sneeze the Middle East out of me, it leaks all over my shirt, and I just want to slide into this computer, push through the screen. I'm magical, I won't crack it, I'll just pull this glass apart like it's a pair of rubber curtains, and join him there, on the other side of the world.

I'm thinking all of this, or none of it maybe, deep in his words like standing in the earthy folds of muddy-origami trenches, my eyes open so wide, so magnified trying to take it in that I can't cry, and the room is silent and my ears are full of Oh, Mary Don't You Weep.

Where else would Moses find me?

I went hunting around on the internet for a version of the song that will match the one I've got in my head, but couldn't find one.

I like the image of the version above -- the banjo player tapping his foot in the air as if it were solid, and the two men on the side twisting their fingers about nervously -- but it's ultimately too posed, to cleanly countrified and ultimately tokenizing. Not right, I'd toss it aside if I could touch it, what comes next?

Aretha Franklin! Oh, Aretha! But her voice is too easily strong, she doesn't even need to try it seems, it's so ultimately beautiful that it loses on some necessary impact.

The Kingston Trio version is awful. What were they thinking? They lost the song. They're pooh-pooh-ing Mary's problem.

Next is Bruce Springsteen, and the news lady says that "this next song is a little bit like New Orleans meets New Jersey," gets it all wrong as the news is wont to do, I guess. Bruce does all right, his is a practiced grit, but he can't help it, he's a showman, a boss (er, The Boss). I'm trying to imagine his voice if he slinked out of the melody a bit, and that would be good. This is saying something, I'm not a Springsteen fan outside of Nebraska.

Anyway, all these people are doing the wrong thing. They're telling Mary not to weep, not to mourn, not to moan, not to scream, but that's just what she's got to do before she can stop. I want to get it out of me, bleed it out. I want a version of the song where the singer seems to understand this. I want Sam Cooke singing it. The Swan Silvertones version is great, but I want him stretching it out.

I don't have much in the way of bible learning, but read that people think the song is not about Jesus's mother, but another Mary, Mary of Bethany. This story says that this Mary is crying her eyes out with a troupe of Jews, asking Jesus to bring her brother back from the dead. Her tears get short shrift in the Bible, apparently. Instead, the King James version has the shortest verse ever that says "Jesus wept." But what about Mary, who lost her brother? What do you do if you're facing the possibility of bringing someone back from the dead, raising a ghost? I'd cry because I couldn't be sure another world existed till that moment. A crossing. A bridge. A hill in the distance. Breaking bread. Soaking it and eating it all mushy with tears, gulping down salty crumbs in your grief, standing in rain, getting soaked in God's salty tears, getting mushy with acid and sweat, being eaten by the hills in the distance or some other great beast, a moving beast of grief, of course you'd cry. Let her cry, till it all washes out. How can I create any art in response to this?