Karen Dalton, trying & rejecting the cult of cool

"I long to prove, I long to show, I long to give, but all within these great hopes lays a trembling body, a sleep that reveals buried dreams and a mind that is only human." —Karen Dalton

for J.R.H.

I’ve been haunted by one moment more than any other from the all together devastating documentary Karen Dalton: In My Own Time. It’s a fragment of Dalton’s journal read by Angel Olsen:

Mistakes thus far
too much confidence
refusal to sacrifice security 
listen to too many people
all of them are wrong
thinking youth will last forever
thinking you’ll succeed without effort.
You haven’t even tried
You haven’t even tried

For me, this is the heart-wrenching tragedy of Karen Dalton’s story. Not the ordinary tragedy of an artist failing to achieve the success she envisioned, but the tragedy of an erroneous personal mythology. An artist’s misapprehension of her own effort — that is a tragedy.