The songs starts with a city-wide search for the speaker: "All over town, the question is going 'round/ 'Where, oh where, can he be?'"
The reference to the old song "Where Has My Little Dog Gone?" leads us to understand that they are searching for him out of concern, and that this is not, say, a manhunt for a criminal.
However, he is not hoping for rescue, either. He is, in fact, just looking for a place to be alone to mope. "I'm hiding in the chapel... You ask me why I sit here and cry... Oh, Lord above/ The only girl I love/ Has gone."
Even though he is not a criminal, he is using the chapel as a sanctuary of a similar sort. Mostly, he is hiding from the concerns, blandishments, and cheering-up of others. He is sad, and wants to be sad. And, just as a wounded animal does, he found a safe den in which to lick his wounds, so to speak.
In a way, he is also signaling those who search for him that he is in severe emotional pain. If he were mostly fine, he would seek their solace and allow himself to be comforted.
Also, he is hiding, he says, "from a broken heart." Something about the chapel allows him to feel distracted.
The next line is somewhat melodramatic: "Here I'll stay, until I hear her say/ That she wants me back again." This is passive-aggressive, but also typical behavior for a wounded person. Probably, he will stay until he gets hungry enough to leave.
Up to this point, he has imagined that his lost love has done one of three things-- moved on, mourned the loss of their relationship, or joined the search for him in order to take him back.
Then he realizes, or has somehow heard (unlikely, as who could tell him?), a fourth possibility: "If it's true that she is hiding, too..."
She might be pulling the same stunt he is! In that case, "I'll search for her." Well, he has put himself in a Catch-22. He is willing to seek her out of she is hiding, but cannot know if this is the case since he is hiding!
It would be easy to deduce that the speaker is disturbed. More likely, he is freshly hurt and simply seeking a place to be alone with his thoughts-- and the Lord. His behavior in this sense, is rational in its irrationality. Of course he's not making sense; his world has just been upended!
There is an assumption that someone sad needs to be cheered up. But sometimes, it's important to just be sad, to have the feeling fully, and let it subside on its own. Attempts to suppress it will only cause it to fester and build up pressure until there is an outburst.
Our speaker is in mourning, a legitimate and perfectly healthy reaction to heartbreak. He will get better, and sort his conflicted feelings out. At least he knows that he needs privacy and solitude in order to do so, and has the wisdom to seek out a place where no one will look for him, so he can recover in peace.
NOTE: This next series of songs is not available, as far as I can discern, online. They are on parts 2 and 3 of a series of 3 CDs collectively titled "Paul Simon aka Jerry Landis: Work in Progress." The subtitle most likely refers not only to the songs but to Simon, as they predate his Simon and Garfunkel output, and so present--to borrow a phrase-- a portrait of the songwriter as a young man. It is an excellent series, with very good biographical and discography (discographical?) information.
Next Song: The People in the Story
Showing posts with label church. Show all posts
Showing posts with label church. Show all posts
Monday, August 11, 2014
Monday, March 18, 2013
Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean
Donovan, seeming to quote the I Ching or some such mystical source, wrote: "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is."
Simon opens this song with "Once upon a time there was an ocean/ But now it's a mountain range." But Simon seems to be inspired more by the history of geological processes. The fossils of giant sea creatures have been found in what are now deserts, and layers of silt of varying thickness are exposed in the striations of cliff-sides that were clearly once river beds. This evidence proves that geothermal bursts, tectonic shifts and glacial plowing have reshaped our planet dozens of times over... and continue to. Even Hawaii is really a mountain range, if you ignore the ocean covering most of the slopes.
But all of that is a prelude to Simon's theme: "Nothing is different, but everything's changed."
The speaker this time is clearly not Simon, but someone with a "dead-end job" that he "think[s] about quitting every day of the week." The "view from [his] window" is "brown and... bleak," just like his outlook in general. "When am I gonna get outta here?" he wonders aloud.
He longs for something to shock him out of his doldrums, perhaps a winning "lottery ticket," which will allow him to live life to the fullest, to "shake every limb in the Garden of Eden."
And here, he ties in his geological metaphor: "Once upon a time, I was an ocean"-- a limitless, wild person-- "But now I'm a mountain range"-- solid and stolid. "Something unstoppable," as irrefutable as a glacier or volcano, put him here, and here he is.
He prides himself on his ability to accept anything, even a simple life, with apartment so small he calls it a "room," and no stove, just a "hot plate." "But I'm easy," he boasts, "I can drift with the drift." This sounds like snow, not a rigid mountain. Still, he has cast himself to fate. It's brown and bleak, but oh well. He's not stuck in a rut, he consoles himself, he's down in the groove!
It's not like "home" was better, anyway: "Never going home again... I never think about home."
So he is both miserable and blase. Since he can't change anything, he takes pride is being able to accept his lot and not rail uselessly about it, even if he does grumble.
"But then comes a letter from home." Well, it's not a lottery ticket, but it does have an affect. "The handwriting's fragile and strange." Once again, "something unstoppable" has been set into motion.
From the evidence, that something is death. And, once again, "nothing is different, but everything's changed." His parent, or whomever, was dead to him anyway ("I never think about home") so his life has not been affected in any outward, visible way. But yet...
How do we know that he goes back home to attend a funeral? We see "stained glass" (the website has a typo-- "stain glass"-- but the liner notes have the correct term, as does the Lyrics book), so it's probably a church. "The frayed cuffs and collars" would be on a worn suit, such as one worn by the deceased. These were "mended by halos of golden thread," calling to mind angels. Oh, and there is a "choir," singing "hymns."
And then this pretty line: "All the... family names/ Came fluttering down leaves of emotion," giving the image of a tree (a family tree?) losing its leaves in autumn. We imagine our speaker, sitting in church at this funeral, hearing the songs and eulogies drifting down upon him from the pulpit. "Leaves" also means "pages" of a book, and at funerals, "family" members in attendance sign their "names" in a guestbook.
The choir is singing a hymn we have never heard of, titled "Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean." It is highly unlikely that a church where Creationism is preached is going to present a sacred song about plate tectonics and the Pangea Theory. So we must assume that our speaker hears something in this music that speaks to him, and this is how it lands on his ears.
Also, instead of the imposing, overwhelming line "something unstoppable set into motion," we have the lyrical, gentle "fluttering down as leaves of emotion" (another website typo; it omits the word "as"). Even so, the almost imperceptible touch of a falling "leaf" seems to have turned him back from a "mountain" to an "ocean," or at least nudged him in that direction.
He still has the same job now, when he leaves the church after the funeral. He is still going back to his "room" and his "hot plate" after the burial. Even his clothes are the same as when he arrived. So "nothing is different," right?
Yes, except for the fact that "everything's changed."
We don't know what happens next. We don't know if he goes home, looks up the classifieds, and finds a new job that gets him a better apartment. We don't know if he stops "drift[ing] with the drift" and becomes more of a purposeful "ocean" with forceful tides. For all we know, he stays back in his "home" town and reconnects with his family.
But we do know that the experience was a moving one, and that he was moved.
This song is sort of a companion to the previous track. In "Another Galaxy," an impending wedding spurs a sudden movement. The bride was moving too fast in a direction she didn't like, and jerked the wheel, only to speed in another direction. Here, a funeral shakes a man out of his rut. He was not driving at all, but now he is.
There is a term in communications theory: "speech act." A "speech act" is something that happens only because we say it has. Such instances are actually quite common: a business transaction, a speeding ticket, a graduation, a wedding, the naming of a baby, the inauguration of a president. Nothing is different afterward-- we are biologically the same as a minute before-- but since we all say and accept that everything has changed, it has. We behave differently. There are even legal consequences.
This is a great part of what it means to be human. That we can change completely, yet show no change outwardly. Donovan sings, in the same song as above, "Caterpillar sheds its skin to find the butterfly within." Well, we humans don't need such obvious shows of change. We can turn from mountains to oceans while sitting still, listening to a song.
Next Song: That's Me.
Simon opens this song with "Once upon a time there was an ocean/ But now it's a mountain range." But Simon seems to be inspired more by the history of geological processes. The fossils of giant sea creatures have been found in what are now deserts, and layers of silt of varying thickness are exposed in the striations of cliff-sides that were clearly once river beds. This evidence proves that geothermal bursts, tectonic shifts and glacial plowing have reshaped our planet dozens of times over... and continue to. Even Hawaii is really a mountain range, if you ignore the ocean covering most of the slopes.
But all of that is a prelude to Simon's theme: "Nothing is different, but everything's changed."
The speaker this time is clearly not Simon, but someone with a "dead-end job" that he "think[s] about quitting every day of the week." The "view from [his] window" is "brown and... bleak," just like his outlook in general. "When am I gonna get outta here?" he wonders aloud.
He longs for something to shock him out of his doldrums, perhaps a winning "lottery ticket," which will allow him to live life to the fullest, to "shake every limb in the Garden of Eden."
And here, he ties in his geological metaphor: "Once upon a time, I was an ocean"-- a limitless, wild person-- "But now I'm a mountain range"-- solid and stolid. "Something unstoppable," as irrefutable as a glacier or volcano, put him here, and here he is.
He prides himself on his ability to accept anything, even a simple life, with apartment so small he calls it a "room," and no stove, just a "hot plate." "But I'm easy," he boasts, "I can drift with the drift." This sounds like snow, not a rigid mountain. Still, he has cast himself to fate. It's brown and bleak, but oh well. He's not stuck in a rut, he consoles himself, he's down in the groove!
It's not like "home" was better, anyway: "Never going home again... I never think about home."
So he is both miserable and blase. Since he can't change anything, he takes pride is being able to accept his lot and not rail uselessly about it, even if he does grumble.
"But then comes a letter from home." Well, it's not a lottery ticket, but it does have an affect. "The handwriting's fragile and strange." Once again, "something unstoppable" has been set into motion.
From the evidence, that something is death. And, once again, "nothing is different, but everything's changed." His parent, or whomever, was dead to him anyway ("I never think about home") so his life has not been affected in any outward, visible way. But yet...
How do we know that he goes back home to attend a funeral? We see "stained glass" (the website has a typo-- "stain glass"-- but the liner notes have the correct term, as does the Lyrics book), so it's probably a church. "The frayed cuffs and collars" would be on a worn suit, such as one worn by the deceased. These were "mended by halos of golden thread," calling to mind angels. Oh, and there is a "choir," singing "hymns."
And then this pretty line: "All the... family names/ Came fluttering down leaves of emotion," giving the image of a tree (a family tree?) losing its leaves in autumn. We imagine our speaker, sitting in church at this funeral, hearing the songs and eulogies drifting down upon him from the pulpit. "Leaves" also means "pages" of a book, and at funerals, "family" members in attendance sign their "names" in a guestbook.
The choir is singing a hymn we have never heard of, titled "Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean." It is highly unlikely that a church where Creationism is preached is going to present a sacred song about plate tectonics and the Pangea Theory. So we must assume that our speaker hears something in this music that speaks to him, and this is how it lands on his ears.
Also, instead of the imposing, overwhelming line "something unstoppable set into motion," we have the lyrical, gentle "fluttering down as leaves of emotion" (another website typo; it omits the word "as"). Even so, the almost imperceptible touch of a falling "leaf" seems to have turned him back from a "mountain" to an "ocean," or at least nudged him in that direction.
He still has the same job now, when he leaves the church after the funeral. He is still going back to his "room" and his "hot plate" after the burial. Even his clothes are the same as when he arrived. So "nothing is different," right?
Yes, except for the fact that "everything's changed."
We don't know what happens next. We don't know if he goes home, looks up the classifieds, and finds a new job that gets him a better apartment. We don't know if he stops "drift[ing] with the drift" and becomes more of a purposeful "ocean" with forceful tides. For all we know, he stays back in his "home" town and reconnects with his family.
But we do know that the experience was a moving one, and that he was moved.
This song is sort of a companion to the previous track. In "Another Galaxy," an impending wedding spurs a sudden movement. The bride was moving too fast in a direction she didn't like, and jerked the wheel, only to speed in another direction. Here, a funeral shakes a man out of his rut. He was not driving at all, but now he is.
There is a term in communications theory: "speech act." A "speech act" is something that happens only because we say it has. Such instances are actually quite common: a business transaction, a speeding ticket, a graduation, a wedding, the naming of a baby, the inauguration of a president. Nothing is different afterward-- we are biologically the same as a minute before-- but since we all say and accept that everything has changed, it has. We behave differently. There are even legal consequences.
This is a great part of what it means to be human. That we can change completely, yet show no change outwardly. Donovan sings, in the same song as above, "Caterpillar sheds its skin to find the butterfly within." Well, we humans don't need such obvious shows of change. We can turn from mountains to oceans while sitting still, listening to a song.
Next Song: That's Me.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
A Church is Burning
Simon released this song on his 1965 solo album Songbook, and it does not appear on any of the five official S&G releases. So, it's a Simon solo number, yes?
Well, it also appears on several S&G compilations, box sets, and concert albums, sung as a duet. And since all of the other material on Songbook appears on one of these five albums, and since it was written when Simon was part of the duo, we'll cover it here.
Thematically and historically, it fits here as well. It is clearly a 1960s protest song, along the lines of "He Was My Brother."
The story is a sadly common one, a church burning. Three "hooded men," evidently KKK members, set a black church ablaze at night. The devastation is contrasted with the hopeful prayers that were being said their earlier that day: "I won't be a slave anymore."
But while the church burns, the fire itself prays: "You can burn down my churches/ But I shall be free."
I have no proof of this, but I have a theory that this imagery was at least in part taken from the Jewish High Holiday service. The prayers on Yom Kippur include the story of the Ten Martyrs. These were ten Torah scholars tortured to death by the Romans for disobeying the order to stop teaching Jewish law; the text details the graphic horror of their tortures. The Chabad website puts the story in context and provides some background information on each of the martyrs:
"One of the martyrs was Rabbi Chananya ben [son of] Teradyon... one of the preeminent sages of his day, yet more than anything he was known as a man with an overriding concern for the poor. His efforts to raise funds on their behalf are legendary...
In the end, he too became a victim of Roman savagery. Before they burned him at the stake, the Romans wrapped his body in a Torah scroll and packed tufts of water-soaked wool around his heart to delay his death and prolong the suffering...
...In his final moments [he] continued to embody the triumph of a noble soul. His final words to his disciples were, 'I see the parchment [of the scroll] burning, but the letters themselves are flying up to Heaven'."
The text in the prayerbook continues that the executioner was so moved that he removed the wool, fanned the flames to hasten the end of the scholar's suffering... and jumped into the blaze himself.
While the imagery is only similar, we know that even the most uninvolved Jews tend to attend Yom Kippur services. Simon is highly likely to have been familiar with this story-- one of religious/racial persecution, with a book-burning image.
As far as the rest of the lyrics, they are fairly self-explanatory. Two images stand out, however. One is the comparison of flame's shape with that of hands placed together in prayer. Both rounded at the bottom and tapered at the top, like a teardrop, the shapes are undeniably similar. We have all seen both shapes our whole lives, but it takes the eye of a poet to connect them.
The other is "the ashes of a Bible." As he later would in "Keep the Customer Satisfied"-- with the lines "I been slandered, libeled/ I heard words I never heard in the Bible"-- Simon contrasts the proclaimed piety of many Bible-thumpers with the horrible things they actually, hypocritically, do.
Church burnings are, sadly, not a thing of the past. As recently as 2006, there was a rash of church burnings in the South. And houses of worship of all faiths continue to be bombed and desecrated to this day. [Note: a French synagogue was firebombed in 2014.] Like this song said in 1965, "The future is now."
Next Song: Red Rubber Ball
Well, it also appears on several S&G compilations, box sets, and concert albums, sung as a duet. And since all of the other material on Songbook appears on one of these five albums, and since it was written when Simon was part of the duo, we'll cover it here.
Thematically and historically, it fits here as well. It is clearly a 1960s protest song, along the lines of "He Was My Brother."
The story is a sadly common one, a church burning. Three "hooded men," evidently KKK members, set a black church ablaze at night. The devastation is contrasted with the hopeful prayers that were being said their earlier that day: "I won't be a slave anymore."
But while the church burns, the fire itself prays: "You can burn down my churches/ But I shall be free."
I have no proof of this, but I have a theory that this imagery was at least in part taken from the Jewish High Holiday service. The prayers on Yom Kippur include the story of the Ten Martyrs. These were ten Torah scholars tortured to death by the Romans for disobeying the order to stop teaching Jewish law; the text details the graphic horror of their tortures. The Chabad website puts the story in context and provides some background information on each of the martyrs:
"One of the martyrs was Rabbi Chananya ben [son of] Teradyon... one of the preeminent sages of his day, yet more than anything he was known as a man with an overriding concern for the poor. His efforts to raise funds on their behalf are legendary...
In the end, he too became a victim of Roman savagery. Before they burned him at the stake, the Romans wrapped his body in a Torah scroll and packed tufts of water-soaked wool around his heart to delay his death and prolong the suffering...
...In his final moments [he] continued to embody the triumph of a noble soul. His final words to his disciples were, 'I see the parchment [of the scroll] burning, but the letters themselves are flying up to Heaven'."
The text in the prayerbook continues that the executioner was so moved that he removed the wool, fanned the flames to hasten the end of the scholar's suffering... and jumped into the blaze himself.
While the imagery is only similar, we know that even the most uninvolved Jews tend to attend Yom Kippur services. Simon is highly likely to have been familiar with this story-- one of religious/racial persecution, with a book-burning image.
As far as the rest of the lyrics, they are fairly self-explanatory. Two images stand out, however. One is the comparison of flame's shape with that of hands placed together in prayer. Both rounded at the bottom and tapered at the top, like a teardrop, the shapes are undeniably similar. We have all seen both shapes our whole lives, but it takes the eye of a poet to connect them.
The other is "the ashes of a Bible." As he later would in "Keep the Customer Satisfied"-- with the lines "I been slandered, libeled/ I heard words I never heard in the Bible"-- Simon contrasts the proclaimed piety of many Bible-thumpers with the horrible things they actually, hypocritically, do.
Church burnings are, sadly, not a thing of the past. As recently as 2006, there was a rash of church burnings in the South. And houses of worship of all faiths continue to be bombed and desecrated to this day. [Note: a French synagogue was firebombed in 2014.] Like this song said in 1965, "The future is now."
Next Song: Red Rubber Ball
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