Street Angel

There has always been the impulse to-- ironic as it seems-- glamorize the poor, from the holy hermits of yore to movies like With Honors in which a self-proclaimed "bum" out-debates a Harvard law professor. Likewise, there has been an long-held impulse to sanctify the mentally ill.

It's true that some indigent or lower-class people are undiscovered geniuses--like "Good" Will Hunting-- and some-- like John Nash in A Beautiful Mind-- struggle with mental illness while still contributing genius-level work to society. But, in fact, the poor and/or mentally ill are just as mixed a bag as the rest of society, goodness-wise and intelligence-wise.

In this song, we get another sacred genius who has not been able to make his way in society and so has wound up homeless. The speaker calls him a "Street Angel," but doesn't give us his name.

He begins by saying that he sympathizes with those good, decent people who are, nevertheless mentally ill and/or homeless: "My heart goes out to the street angels." He "saves his change" for them, too, and is especially impressed with the ones "working their way back home" either geographically or psychologically.

He doesn't just give them his money, either-- he gives them something more rare: his attention. He talks to one Street Angel who confesses: "Nobody talks to me much." The speaker says he can relate: "Nobody talks to me much." [The italics are not in the lyrics but implied in the delivery and inflection when sung.]

The Street Angel also has something else in common with the speaker (assuming it's Simon himself); they are both writers. But the Angel does it for free. The Street Angel says he makes his verse "for the universe" and asks nothing in return-- he does it for the "hoot" of it. This is an old expression-- "Wasn't that a hoot?" once meant "Wasn't that so very funny?"

"The tree is bare," says the Angel, "but the root of it/ Goes deeper than logical reasoning." Maybe nothing he does bears any fruit, in other words, but there is a reason to do it beyond the expectation of return, or rather not a reason but an emotional compulsion.

Then the Angel switches topics to religion: "God goes fishing/ And we are the fishes." So religion is a trap, complete with a lure: "He baits his [sic] lines/ With prayers and wishes." Does it work? Yes: "We're hungry for the love, and so we bite." God uses our loneliness against us, he argues.

So he is not changing topics as such, but returning to the original one, about how nobody talks to him. He's in a bind-- he's lonely, but on the one hand, human-type people ignore him... and on the other, God while does seek his company, it's only for selfish reasons.

His response is two-fold: To retreat from the world ("We hide our hearts like holy hostages") and to assume all communication is a one-way street-- to/at the world, but not back from it ("I tell my tale for the toot of it.")

What becomes of the Street Angel? Even though he was "working his way back home," he is removed from the street by the same society that dumped him there: "They took him away in the ambulance... He waved goodbye from the ambulance." One last gesture of communication with the one person who ever acknowledged him.

There is one note of possible hope. Remember how he was "working his way back home"? Well, now, he "made a way with the ambulance." So even though it's only "a" way and not "his" way-- and even though that way is not "back home"-- at least he is not on the street anymore.

And he still gets to be an angel.

The song concludes with the line: "My heart goes out to the street angel." Does it matter if a homeless or mentally ill person is angelic in some intellectual or spiritual way? Can't you still feel bad for them, even if they are ordinary, just because they live on the street?


Next Song: Stranger to Stranger

The Rhythm of the Saints

The last track gives us the title of the album The Rhythm of the Saints. The story I heard of the title's source comes from the days of the American slave trade. The slaves continued, in the New World, to pray on drums to their usual deities, as they had in Africa. When questioned about this practice, they lied to their "masters" that they were praying with their rhythms to the Christian saints.

The song begins with what was an afterthought-line of "The Coast": "If I have weaknesses/ Don’t let them blind me." It's a plea to be free of deception. Yes, I know I have faults, the speaker says, but I hope I do not therefore miss something important while I am distracted by them.

Here, the thought is continued, "...or camouflage all I am wary of." These weaknesses could also make him miss the warning of something dangerous. Say he knows he should be "wary of" financial come-ons. Yet, he has a weakness for sob stories. While he might not be taken in by someone grinning while selling the Brooklyn Bridge, he might try to help out a person posing as a wronged Third World prince who sends him an e-mail of woe.

The weakness he describes seems to be an over-involvement in whatever emotion he is experiencing at the moment. He doesn't just laugh and enjoy himself, he "could be sailing on seizures of laughter," which sounds both out-of-control and almost violent. He doesn't get over break-ups easily, either, but finds himself slowly, painfully "crawling out from under the heel of love." He hears no answer to his prayer for greater awareness of his surroundings.

It seems he prays to Olodumare, a gender-less, incorporeal Yoruba deity who is the ruler of heaven, the creator of energy, and the source of morality, who also allows for the interaction between creatures and forces we in the West call "The Butterfly Effect." Since the speaker believes that Olodumare is "smiling," he answers his own question. Do our speaker's prayers remain unanswered? No, they have been answered, and in the affirmative.

Then comes this repeated chant: "Reach in the darkness/ A reach in the dark." All faith is, after a fashion, an attempt to grasp something that we can't see in a space that is impenetrable to human senses. Also a reach in the darkness is life itself. If Heaven is "dark" to our senses, then so is tomorrow. Not every "enemy," "obstacle," or blade is visible. Somehow, we must sense their presence before we cut ourselves and "glide away" from danger before it attacks. The speaker realizes the enormity of the task. We must "dominate" even what it is "impossible" to.

Further, we may have thought that it was "impossible" to, for instance, lose our jobs, contract a fatal illness, or lose a limb in an accident-- and yet, here it is, shockingly possible after all. And yet, we must forge ahead. Another weakness our speaker feels he has is that he is not popular. He feels that he is "always a stranger," and worse, "when strange isn’t fashionable" (So not, say, at Studio 54, where it was).

And what is? "Fashion is rich people waving at the door." Whether they are waving at their own door or the speaker's is immaterial-- he can no more enter their rich home than they would enter his poor one. Also, fashion is "a dealer in drugs or in passion/ Lies of a nature we’ve heard before." What's popular? Being lied to. "Tell me sweet little lies," coax Fleetwood Mac; "Lie to me/ I promise I'll believe," pleads Sheryl Crow.

This time, the prayer is directed to "Babalu-aye." He is Olodumare's representative on Earth, and has the power over the Earth and physical things, including possessions but also the body, health and disease. Because of this association with illness, he is seen as a disciplinarian... but also a healer, even if he is depicted as disabled himself.

The image of this god of "spinning on his crutches" should not imply constant spinning, but more like "he spun on his heel." The god turns to leave, as if to say, "Oh, is that all this was about?" tossing the reply over his shoulder as he hobbles over to his next petitioner. So the prayer is: "I never feel like I fit in!" And the reply this time is not just a smile but a verbal answer: “Leave if you want." You don't like it here? Well, who's making you stay? You don't fit in anywhere you have been? OK, so try somewhere you haven't been!

Another "reach in the darkness," to travel somewhere unfamiliar, where even the razors and knives are new. This song forms an interesting companion with "Spirit Voices." In that song, the spirits were eager to interact; here, they are less so, yet still helpful.

The rhythm of the "saints" seems very much like the rhythm of a heartbeat. The same blood that pumps out of the heart is pumped back in, then out again. It helped to voice his concerns aloud, but he held the answers within all along. Perhaps the "darkness" is not a deep cave, or the night sky, or anywhere external. It's dark inside a person, too.

Musical Note:
This song was sampled on a song called "Reach Out" by an act calling itself Eligh. I can only assume that is an imaginative spelling of the name Eli.

Next song: Thelma

Think Too Much (b)

This second half of a diptypch is presented first. Both halves discuss the two halves of the brain, repeating the idea that "the left side... dominates the right." The left side being the logical, rational, objective half, while the right is creative, emotional, and subjective. (Similar to the idea of, respectively, Yang and Yin.)

By the language, this one seems to be the logical half, at least at first. It begins with the image of "the smartest people in the word" being "gathered" to-- and here is the key word-- "analyze" a broken love affair.

The team is as thorough as one from the forensic shows now overwhelming our televisions. The analysts didn't just look at the couple's evidence, they scrutinized it; "They sat among our photographs/ Examined every one," which took until sunrise. The result? "In the end, we compromised," a traditionally logical conclusion.

But then comes the chorus, which is only the line "Maybe I think too much," repeated. Maybe, even after all of this analytic work, analysis is not the way to approach a broken relationship, or a broken heart. Maybe overanalysis was the issue that caused some of the problem to begin with.

In "Slip-Slidin' Away," a father comes "a long way" to explain himself to his son, only to leave the son to sleep. This time, the father is more demonstrative: "In the night, my father came to me/ And held me to his chest./ He said, 'There's not much more that you can do/ Go and get some rest.'"

Getting some rest after a night of rehashing a broken love might be the logical thing to do, but only because it recognizes that hearts (and bones) have their limits. The father does more for this man than did all of "the smartest people in the world," because he does not try to analyze a problem. He simply tries to care for his son.

The son responds "Yeah, maybe I think too much." Maybe, the speaker realizes, the right response is not to overthink how overthinking his relationship led to his spending the night overthinking how it collapsed. Maybe he should just go to bed.

The song is brief, but it contains a powerful message. This time, Simon (if he is the speaker) is not "weary to his bones" after a "long, long day" of working songwriting or touring or running his office or even "weary from waiting down in Washington DC."

He is emotionally exhausted from dealing with the pain of his failed relationship. He wants to exhibit some emotion, which cannot be avoided after poring over one photo album after another, filled with images and memories. Yet all night was spent "examining" the pictures, using the wrong side of his brain. His brain, furthermore, and not his heart.

Maybe one can think "too much." Maybe sometimes the right thing to do-- the logical thing to do-- is to feel. Now it is time to "get some rest" and let the right side, the side of emotion, "labor through the long and speechless night," spinning out dreams.

This at first seems a negative thing to the speaker. In both the (b) and (a) halves of this song, the right side is said to have to "work hard" or "labor" all night, as if this were a punishment for allowing itself to be dominated.

But in both songs it's remarked that "they say" one side dominates. In these songs-- and we will have to conclude this discussion when (a) shows up two songs from now-- this conventional wisdom seems to be challenged.

So which side does Simon come down on? We'll have to see. In the meantime, don't think too much about it.

Next Song: Song About the Moon