“I hate the man I used to be, But he'll always be a part of me, right now looking at my past…I know it’s unpretty.”--- Jelly Roll
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?” ---Hemingway
One classic struggle, two men, two souls. Hemingway seems a man broken by tension. A man’s man by reputation. The four wives, the whiskey and emotional polarity, all hint at a soul not sated. In contrast his experiences were bigger than life. His writing rich and vibrant, he poured himself into everything he did.
Jelly Roll is the biggest artist on the country music scene.
Not the man’s man Hemingway was. Incarcerated for much of his young life, his daughter
Bailee was born while he was in jail. That crushed him. He turned to the gospel
he’d heard as a child. His music is his story. He plays it close to the bone. It
resonates.
Both struggling with darkness and their love for whiskey.
Hemingway certainly; and would have benefited from current pharmacology. Jelly
Roll shares part of how he was healed from self-pharmacology through 12-steps,
“Hardly sobered up, already wanna quit quittin’, sweaten’ in an old church
basement, wishin’ I was wasted.”
At 19 Hemingway was on the frontlines delivering candy when
he was hit by machine-gun fire and 200 metal fragments. A priest administered
last rites. As a result he converted to Catholicism. Later, he “more formally”
converted” upon marrying his second, Catholic, wife. Some credit these
‘conversions’ to his vision and moral landscape. Whether he was committed to
the framework of the church or to the risen Christ, his writing reflected the three
great transcendentals of truth, goodness and beauty.
Knowing God doesn’t guarantee good art. Faulty coping
mechanisms aren’t easily slayed. It’s surgery. In Christ, in art, in healing, fulness
necessitates leaning into the blade. “There is nothing to writing. All you do
is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
