The Vigil Beside the Wound
Klimt tried to paint it. Cline sang through it.
Her voice loops in a place like this. Somewhere cold. Somewhere her body never went but the sound did. Grocery store. Waiting room. Car radio at a red light. You don’t need to know the words. You know it’s the Cline.
She tried to record “Crazy” just once before. Her ribs wouldn’t let her. A June car crash had brushed her up against death and made it too hard to reach the notes. What we hear now was recorded one week later. A single take in October 1961.
At thirteen, rheumatic fever nearly killed her. When she came to, her voice boomed “like Kate Smith,” she said. She didn’t finish high school. She worked the soda counter. She sang in dresses her mother sewed from patterns she made up herself.
What her new voice held, Klimt once tried to paint in Vienna. Between 1894 and 1901, he worked on a vertical column of bodies the size of a garage door to be one of three on the ceiling in the Great Hall. The University of Vienna rejected the commissioned paintings. Gustav kept them.
In Medicine, a heaving cloud whips and whirs. The hive hums and dissolves. A woman in suspended drift. An eyeless face howls. Centered and grounded, Hygieia, goddess of health, wields her serpent and bowl, and watches you watching.
She is prevention. Not cure, but continuity. The vigil beside the wound. In the few images we have, she is poised and young, feeding a snake coiled around her arm or holding a vessel from which no one drinks.
The painting no longer exists. It burned in 1945, when Nazi troops torched Schloss Immendorf, the castle holding the art they stole or looted. All that remains is a photograph of it before the flame.
Sometimes, we don’t want the wound. Just the cavern and the echo. Patsy started telling people, “The third one will either be a charm or it’ll kill me.”
She went back on the road six weeks after the crash. Wigs to cover the gash. Headbands to ease the pressure. On “American Bandstand,” her voice settled on your living room floor. She told Dick Clark, “I just sing like I hurt inside.”
A few months later in Kansas City and sick with the flu, three sets in one night. A red dress, then a white one. The last song of the night: “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone.”
The weather was especially bad for March. The next morning, they found the plane’s parts deep in a Tennessee forest. Her wristwatch stopped at 6:20 p.m. Her shoes were never found.
Thank you for reading. If this stayed with you, a single 🫧 Lava Drop helps keep the light on.
Patsy Cline was amazing!