So Beautiful or So What

“There are only two ways to live your life," Einstein once opined. "One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Simon more succinctly puts this: "So beautiful, or so what."

This driving song starts off with the speaker describing the "chicken gumbo" he is making, then shrugging "life is what you make of it." You have certain ingredients, but the choice of how to combine them is yours.

His next example is a "bedtime story" he tells his children, which may or may not have a happy ending. In either case, the moral remains the same-- the story is the work of the storyteller.

He continues with a gush of humility-- he is "just a raindrop in a bucket," one nameless, indistinct entity among many. He is but "a coin dropped in a slot," a means to an end. "An empty house on Weed Street," even.

Next, we have a musing on "the way we're ignorant," going so far as to "seek out bad advice." Why? We will "jigger it and figure it," rationalizing our (mis)behavior anyway. Even better if we can blame our misdeeds on the urging of others. 

Worse, even though "life is what you make of it" and you can, therefore, actually make something of it, we "play a game with time and love/ Like a pair of rolling dice"... and leave major life decisions up to chance!

The last verse is a major shift-- to a famous photograph of the men who pointed to the direction from which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s fatal bullet originated. The speaker adds the idea of the responding police siren singing the spiritual "Savior, Pass Me Not." 

Why this historical reference here? Dr. King taught that justice was up to us, as individuals, in the ways we chose to treat each other. His own life story embodied the idea that a person could make his life be the way he wanted it to be. So we choose to make of his death what we will-- a warning to not get involved, or a call to get involved and carry the torch he passed us, spreading the light.

The theme of this song is stated outright several times. But the placing of this song as the last on the album serves to somewhat dismiss the spiritual, divine musings that permeated the rest of the album. We're never going to know, ultimately, what goes on in Heaven. And, since we couldn't affect it even if we did know, our best bet is to focus on the world we do have and can shape.

This echoes a teaching from the Talmud. The giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, at the Revelation, was not just a spiritual event. It had practical, even legal, ramifications. God gave the Bible to the humans... and it is ours now. "It is not in Heaven" anymore, say the rabbis. It is here, and it belongs to humanity.

Hopefully, this is only Simon's latest song, not his last. But it marks a culmination of a lifetime of theological pondering. In  the very first song we covered, "Bleecker Street," Simon noticed that seems to be a "fog" hiding God from humanity. All these years and songs later, he has stopped trying to pierce the fog with his eyes. 

He is resigned that "life is what you make of it," and that your own attitude, while it is all you can control, is all that matters anyway.

Musical note: 

The unusual instruments this time are...

the bansuri, a wooden flute from India, 

the croatles, a set of tiny tuned cymbals arranged on a rack and struck with mallets

the saz, a Middle Eastern string instrument with a round back, resembling a long-necked lute

the resonator, a guitar with a steel plate over the sound hole, sometimes called a dobro.

Next Song: Tennessee

How Can You Live in the Northeast?

Often, Simon seems to have two songs going at once, sewing them together at the end. Here, it seems there are three. One is about watching fireworks on July 4, the USA's Independence Day. Another is about making life choices. And the third is about Simon's musings on his own family history.

The discussion about those things in life which we choose-- or not-- takes up the bulk of the song. The chorus, from which the title comes, sounds accusatory: "How can you live in the northeast?" Usually, when asked a question of that nature, we hear "How could you...?" or more pointedly, "How dare you...?"

But then we hear the rest of the chorus, which asks the listener how he or she could live in "the South," or on the "banks of a river"? So the question is not accusatory at all. It's a genuine question of wonder. How can you live here... when you are forgoing a life there? How does one decide, when the options are limitless, and one such choice precludes all others? This query is then extended into the realm of religion-- how can one choose to believe any one thing, when there are so many things to believe? In one of the choruses, the question is further extended to specific practices; "How can you tattoo your body/ Why do you cover your head?"

And then something as basic as food: "How can you eat from your rice bowl?" Ah, but then comes a judgment: "How can you eat from your rice bowl? The holy man only breaks bread." This comes to show how silly these judgments are, especially coming from a Western perspective. Do we really think the only holy men are the ones who eat bread, not rice? Well, then, why do we act like it?

Simon backs off in one of the verses, admitting that in fact we do not make many such decisions. They are an accident of birth, and babies are totally dependent on those adults to care for him or her: "Weak as the winter sun, we enter life on Earth." A father myself several times over, I can tell you that the next line is also correct; before we even process the idea of being a parent, a bureaucrat comes in with a form for us, demanding the name of the newborn. And then there is the ceremony welcoming the infant into the religious community and instruction in a language: "Names and religion come just after birth... everyone gets a tongue to speak." None of these major factors in our development are our own choices!

Ah, but why the word "tongue?" Why not "language?" Because we are born with that part of our anatomy-- a tongue-- with which to make our own voice heard, and our own wishes known. Once we can assemble words into our own sentences, we do start to guide our own courses more and more. After all, "everyone hears an inner voice," of consciousness and conscience. Of self-awareness. It is up to us to listen to it and decide how much of it to share with the rest of the world, and in what manner, with our "tongues."

Then Simon poses a puzzler: "If the answer is infinite light, why do we sleep in the dark?" This is not just a practical question, although even nocturnal animals find dark places to sleep during the day. But Simon has provided his own answer. The same as with sound, so with light-- if we have an inner voice, do we not also have an internal brightness? Further, is there not such a thing as "blinding light," a brightness that denies us the ability to see? We can only see this "infinite light," perhaps, with our eyes closed, and only with our subconscious mind. No matter-- it is internal in any case.

Now, what does any of this have to do with fireworks? The song starts with them, after all. The fireworks celebrate American independence from colonialism. This was one of the greatest strokes for self-determination in human history. "This is a free country," we Americans are fond of saying, but first the whole nation had to become free for the individuals in it to share in that self-determination, that liberty.

(Yes, I know... almost 300 years later and we're still working on getting everyone their fair share of that liberty! And while we are no longer a colony of the British Crown, there are still colonies aplenty on Earth, and some are American).

The holiday is a celebration of excess-- noise and explosions, fire and food, family and parades. It is "happy-go-lucky." We have created many chances in American to become lucky, and we are happy about that. And no one wants to see the party end, so we wait until the fireworks are mere "fireflies" in the sky before packing on home.

But we watch them across the "endless skies," because that's what we see when even the fireflies fade. The sky, and how endless it is. We see in its infinity the infinity of our own possibilities.

And so the question of the title might be phrased: "Now that you can do anything, what do you want to do?" And, since you can choose anything, how can you choose any one thing?

The song ends with a verse in which Simon assesses how all of this has impacted him. He is the son of immigrants, "only three generations off the boat," and has had all of the benefits of the American Dream: "I've been given all I wanted." Usually one plants, then harvests, but Simon knows that in his case, others planted for him first, so he correctly says "I have harvested and I have planted," meaning for his own children.

The song closes with the observation that "I am wearing my father's old coat." When he was born, he was given a name, a faith, a language and so forth. And like other Americans, he grew up to know that these were not the only options. That he could truly choose another name, faith, language and so forth.

But, like most people, he chose to keep the ones he had been given. How can you live in the Northeast, or anywhere else, forsaking all other places? Well, maybe you don't want to move too far from the place of your roots. Maybe, like an old coat, it just... fits.

Add to Simon's grand songs about America-- "America" and "American Tune"-- this one.

IMPACT:
Surprise was, musically, a departure for Simon, as he made extensive use of electronic production (and electronic music guru Brian Eno) instead of his usual acoustic or electric instruments. Suzanne Vega had done the same with her 99.9oF album more than a decade before, but it was still a, um, surprise when Simon did it.

Surprise made it to #4 in the UK and cracked the Top 10 in Ireland, going gold there. In the US, it rose to "only" #14. It also made the Top 20 in much of Scandinavia and did well in other Northern European countries.


Next Song: Everything About It is a Love Song

Sunday Afternoon

Here, Esmerelda, Sal's mother, speaks. He is in jail, but she is somewhat trapped as well, as she explains.

She writes to her son in prison, using his adult name, Salvador. She tells him that lunch is over, but even though it is noon, there is no sunlight in her apartment: "The buildings here, tall as our mountains/ Slice through the windows and cut off the sun."

By "our mountains," she means those back home, in Puerto Rico. She is homesick. Even if life was hard there... well, it is hard in New York, too, but not as pretty outside! Still she vows to Salvador to "never return until you are free." Thoughts of the homeland fo cheer her, especially when she hears the Aguialdo-- a Hispanic Christmas carol of sorts-- to which she dances with her daughter, Aurea.

She confides to him that she has been "unlucky" in love. Her Puerto Rican husband drank and ran around. Gonzales, the preacher who brought her to America, was a "hypocrite," who "beat you and preached about repentance/ Has gone." Actually, she left Gonzales, after he abandoned Sal to his prison fate.

Esmerelda might also point out that the church that took them in to begin with was also, ultimately, cruel to Salvador. Both lands, both husbands, both churches, have made promises of rescue... only to require that they be rescued from them, in turn!

"Another Sunday ends," Esmerelda sighs. This throwaway line is actually very telling. Esmerelda is no longer banking on "Sunday,"... on promises of faith and salvation, especially not by those who profess religious power.

No... "tomorrow is another hardworking Monday." She is trying to depend on herself, on her own work. But this seems another blind alley filled with false promises; "I am still hoping for the raise they promised me." Perhaps, someday, she will have the fortitude to remind her employers of their promise. For now, she is neither dependent on men--husbands or her son-- nor on the Church.

"There's a job as a operator/ If I could speak the language easily." In the era before cell phones, operators were telephone company employees who helped connect calls, provide 411 information, etc.; today, their job would be called "customer service." Naturally, fluency was a requirement. Esmerelda is unaware that classes in English for non-native speakers have been offered in places like libraries and community centers for decades, and she seems still too reticent to even ask after such things.

After all of her struggles, she seems ready to take a break, though: "I view my light with resignation." Further, she is still a several-times-over minority-- a woman, an immigrant, older than most job seekers, a not-quite fluent-enough-speaker. Oh, and the mother of a well-known convicted murderer, which could also hurt her career prospects.

She also seems content to consider "the Barrio" as "our own little nation," a Puerto Rican island, as it were, within the island of Manhattan. Perhaps being close to her people is as close as she can get to being with her family, which dwindles ever smaller. Wistfully, she tells Sal, "Sometimes I hear you run upstairs."

Even with all of her betrayals by the organized Church, Esmerelda still clings to her faith, and tells Sal to, also: "Keep your Bible near you."

Why? Because "time is an ocean of endless tears." Every time she put herself forward-- to the church back in Puerto Rico, to both her husbands, to this new land, and now to her job-- she has been slapped backward.

And now, she sits in her apartment, and Sal in his cell.. each a prisoner wavering between resignation to darkness and hope of sunlight.

But the Bible tells of the rise of Joseph, the Exodus from bondage, the entrance into the Promised Land, the elevation of David.... and the Ascension of Jesus. All stories of lowly people achieving liberty, self-determination, and salvation.

Next Song: Time is an Ocean