Today we need to talk about Willie Nelson and Always on my Mind.
Charting a spiritual and sociocultural journey through the dense symbolism of the American West in order to achieve some higher intuitive and aesthetic goals is child’s play. Willie raises the stakes with a generous, rollicking appropriation of the form and substance of the landscape, and in the process implicates himself as a vital fixture of this very landscape.
The inward light and historical shadows of the American West are transfigured through the cultural metaphor of Willie. As the vistas, canyons, and red rocks of the desert states act as a kind of geographic euphemism for the value system of ruggedness, time worn individualism, and New World narcissism, so too does Willie.
By inserting himself into the main frame of an otherwise delightful scenery shot with his futuristic outerwear, Willie is an organic continuation of the 20th century’s OG moment of historic bravado: that of the astronauts planting a flag on the moon and gloating mine, mine, mine. For what is the barren moonscape of the American West without eyes to see it, without settler chauvinism to map it?
Something about the tone of Always On My Mind is redolent of the sentimental vision of the 19th century Romantic movement in literature and painting. We can identify traces of Romanticism’s heritage in the categorization of the landscape as something sublime and endowed with meaning, and on the emphasis on subjective transformational experiences.
In a sense Always on My Mind is like an inversion of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, whereby the lone traveler is captivated by the fearsome grandeur of the landscape and moved by the weight of his own solitude. Caspar’s traveler looks inward as he looks outward, transmuting the sensations of his lived experience into a private inner dream. Willie does just the opposite, eschewing solitude by soliciting the approving glance of his cultural peers. Willie looks outward as he looks inward, projecting his inner musings and vanities onto both the eyes of the spectator and the yielding canvas of the Western desert landscape.
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, oil painting by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818
