27: The Mystery behind Joni Mitchell's Song "Both Sides Now"

27 

The Mystery behind Joni Mitchell’s Song

“Both Sides Now”

Life is a mystery, and it only gives up its secrets occasionally, like it did to Joni Mitchell, a young twenty-one year old artist who wrote her signature song “Both Sides Now” that Rolling Stone ranked #171 on its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time; but how could such a young artist write a song that speaks to the human condition with such profound wisdom and wistful melancholy? That’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

The seed for today’s musing was sown six or seven months ago while watching a PBS membership drive one weekend; they were featuring music by some of the classical favorites, like Joni Mitchell, and something that one of the volunteer hosts said alerted me to attention, because it spoke to the mystery behind Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now.”

He was in his late thirties or early forties, and well-versed and articulate on the music they were featuring to solicit donations from viewers, but upon listening to Joni’s 2000 life-seasoned rendition of “Both Sides Now” he made a personal comment that addressed the mystery of the lyrics that speak to the enantiodromiac nature of the human condition—the being and non-being dynamic of our becoming.

This is a deep, deep mystery which has taken me a lifetime to unravel; but as I listened to Joni singing “Both Sides Now” on the PBS membership drive, I “saw” the archetypal pattern of the human condition play itself out in the lyrics, and I had to laugh to myself when the volunteer host humbly confessed, “I get it now. I finally get it.”

He had listened to “Both Sides Now” for years, but not until that moment did the mystery of the lyrics give themselves up to him, and he attributed it to the fact that he was married now with a young family and as he listened to Joni’s emotionally rich rendition of the song that she wrote when she was only twenty-one  he was somehow magically awakened to the inscrutable mystery of the enantiodromiac process of his own life—the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, the pains and the joys, and all the loves and hates that we’re all subject to as we wind our way through the many twists and turns of life.

“I guess you have to be older to get what Joni meant by both sides of life,” he revealed, with a self-conscious smile; and I laughed at his epiphany, because until we experience both sides of life how can we possibly appreciate the mystery of man’s paradoxical nature?

Joni tells us how the song came to her: “I was reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King on a plane and early in the book Henderson the Rain King is also up in a plane. He’s on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea that the song would become as popular as it did.”

How could she? She was only twenty-one years old, and her lyrics spoke to the whole emotional drama of life; but why did life give up its mystery to such a young artist?

It may be abstract, and possibly much too tenuous for anyone to believe, but I had an experience in my early twenties that speaks to Joni’s inspired creation of “Both Sides Now.” Like my own inspired moment on the loneliest night of my life in Annecy, France when I wrote something that foretold my own becoming, Joni’s song foretold her life also; because in that moment of inspired thought she became ensouled with the archetypal spirit of the human condition, and although “Both Sides Now” spoke to the enantiodromiac process of every person’s life, it also set the symbolic pattern of Joni’s own becoming.

Late in her life, after many highs and lows and loves and losses that she transformed with creative integrity into songs that reflected the individuation process of her own becoming, Joni revealed the impenetrable secret of the paradoxical nature of man in “Both Sides Now” that had prophetically foretold her own growth and individuation: “I thrive on change. That’s probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They’ll be going along on one key and I’ll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that’s how my life is.”

Being an artist, Joni Mitchell’s life symbolized the archetypal pattern of change that is inherent to the human condition; that’s why life gave up its mystery to her, so she could reveal the mystery of enantiodromia to the world in the lyrics of her songs, as art is wont to do.

 The Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung borrowed the word enantiodromia from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, which simply means that over time everything turns into its opposite, and this speaks to the archetypal pattern of change in “Both Sides Now” that puzzled Joni throughout her life; but why did her unconscious burst through on the plane that day when she wrote the song that has touched the hearts of so many people? Had she just given up her baby daughter for adoption? Was this the loneliest time of Joni’s life, too? Was she so vulnerable that God smiled on her with the lyrics to the song that soothed her soul and opened up the door to her career?

“I've looked at life from both sides now /From up and down, and still somehow /It's life's illusions I recall /I really don't know life at all,” wrote the prescient young artist; and she went out into the world to live out the archetypal pattern of her own becoming being so true to herself that she set the holy standard, just as I went out into the world and lived out the archetypal pattern of my own becoming after I wrote what I did that night in Annecy, France.

I was twenty-three years old, and I had gone to France to begin my own quest of self-discovery, and I was desperately alone and lonely from my precipitous departure from my safe and comfortable life in Canada when I came in from my walk that evening. I sat at my desk in my one room apartment with my pen in hand and wrote the following words which came as a gift to me from the same place that Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides Now” came from, the all-knowing creative unconscious that is the source of man’s creative genius:

“Steadfast and courageous is he, who having overcome woe and grief remains alone and undaunted. Alone I say for to be otherwise would hardly seem possible, for one must bear one’s conscience alone. He must fight the battle, and he must win the battle, odds or no odds; he must win to establish the equilibrial tranquility of body and soul, and sooner or later he will erupt as a volcano of unlimited confidence which will purpose his life thereafter. And having given birth to such magnificence he will no longer be alone alone, but alone in society; and he will see the mirror of his puerile grief in the eyes of his fellow man.”

These words burned themselves into my memory, and as desperate and lonely as I felt that day those words gave me so much solace that all I had to do was repeat them to myself to give me the strength I needed whenever self-doubt possessed me; and from day to day, week to week, and year to year they kept the fire in my soul burning until I “squared the circle” and resolved the paradoxical dynamic of my own becoming.

And that’s why Joni’s song “Both Sides Now” makes me cry every single time I hear it, because it brings me back to the impossible dilemmas of my life that gave me so much pain and sorrow; until, that is, I mastered the secret of how to transcend myself with what in “Ode to Duty” William Wordsworth called “the spirit of self-sacrifice.”

That’s why Joni’s song “Both Sides Now” is so sweetly melancholic, because it cannot resolve the perplexing mystery of “life’s illusions.” And yet, even though “something’s lost” in what we do, there’s always “something gained in living every day,” because this is the nature of the enantiodromiac process of our becoming; and Joni was called to write this song that introduced her to the rest of her life and to the world.

Destiny called Joni on the plane that day when she looked down at the clouds and wrote the lyrics to “Both Sides Now,” which she described as a meditation on reality and fantasy; and when Judi Collins made it into a hit, Joni’s destiny was set. Her song came as “an idea that was so big it seemed like I’d barely scratched the surface of it,” but it was an idea so true to the enantiodromiac process of the human condition that it became a standard for many singers and recorded more than three hundred times. As one interviewer said, “the song knows where it’s meant to go, and it knows what to do when it gets there.”

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