Background: In the autumn of 1998, I decided to visit London. The trip from Los Angeles is a long one -in miles, in history, and in culture - and I wasn't at all sure why I was going; it was just something I felt I needed to do.
I arranged to stay in a private home just around the corner from the Victoria & Albert Museum. The owner was a Mrs. Elliot. As I was getting ready for bed that first night, feeling somewhat lost and alone, wondering why I had come to this city of strangers where I had no reason to be, she appeared at the door of my room. "By the way," she chirped, "you're sleeping in Lord Byron's camp bed." Suddenly I knew I was exactly where I wanted to be!
The bed was inherited from an eccentric aunt who once lived in a suite of rooms at Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron's ancestral home. The bed (pictured below) was short and impossibly uncomfortable for any modern human, but it was the real thing (minus the chintz draperies). It was one of two made specifically to Lord Byron's instructions and taken with him when he galloped off to join the partisan fighters in Greece. The four-poster can be completely disassembled and packed for travel using the brass fasteners, two of which you can just make out near the top and bottom of the post in the left foreground.
Sleeping in Byron's bed quickly became a metaphor for my visit to London as I met people with ties to artists of the past, many with close personal connections through a web of friendships and family relations. In the rootless, disconnected culture of the American west to which I am accustomed, no such web of relationships exists; art and intellect, more often than not, must survive in a vacuum. For me, it was a whole new way of looking at art - as a continuum, a river.
The phrase "sleeping in Byron's bed" came to represent the perception of a long, unbroken line of artists who share an intimate relationship through their struggle to communicate their emotions. I had this feeling when I went to visit Keats' house - he seemed so present and real - and again when I went to Cambridge, and again on Cheyne Walk where Rosetti and Ruskin lived and worked and hung out. I realized that we all struggle with the same issues; some days we feel we have no talent at all, even Keats, even Van Gogh. We all dream the same dreams. We all sleep in the same bed.
Factoids:
The first verse lyric "Are you capable of living with uncertainty..." is a paraphrase of Keats' theory of Negative Capability.
Mrs. Elliot sold the bed and nightstand in 1999 for $20,000 to a collector of Byron memorabilia. I'm glad I got there first.
This song includes an infamous Area 51 which occurs just after the line "Maybe you will take up painting." For an explanation, read my online diary for June 20, 2002: Area 51 For Songwriters.
