Flipping Through My Back Pages

    The greatest lyricist in the history of popular music is Bob Dylan. On this, there can be no debate. Rant all you want, and I do, about the musicality of his performances on albums of his own material - the harmonies, melodies, rhythms, et al. - but it's a fool's errand to hunt for another wordsmith in his class. Sure, there are other artists who present unique turns of phrase for expressing complex ideas in a subtle fashion. I'm reminded, as I always am, of Steely Dan. But Dylan stands alone for his marriage of quality and quantity. The copious output of his career and lyrical density of the songs themselves assign him a place of unparalleled importance - unparalleled influence - in popular music. 

    A favorite of mine are the lyrics of "My Back Pages," a deeper cut from his 1964 classic, Another Side of Bob Dylan. I find most compelling the fact that this song is applicable to the life and times of Dylan in the mid 1960's as well as to us right here and now, some 58 years later. I also find the Byrds' 1967 cover a beautifully melodious complement to the lyrics themselves. That recording cut out some of the lyrics Dylan wrote, so I've linked Dylan's version and the full lyrics at the bottom.

   

    In the song, Dylan expresses disillusion with parts of the protest movement for which he was seen as a leading voice. The folk music circuit of that period promoted an admixture of roots music and political engagement, and Dylan was looked upon as a paragon thereof. But by 1964, Dylan had made a perceptive realization: namely, that the exuberance of fighting for what one believes in may lead one into becoming what one doesn't - if one's argument takes precedence over compassion for whomever one is arguing with. Think in our own times about how cable news discussions are presented. Or, worse, read the comments section of any fringy news site. What you sometimes find is people trying to win a political argument (i.e. the convincing of another person to their viewpoint) while sprinkling in invective and insult. "If you don't agree with me about Issue X, you're a dumbass!" The contradiction becomes even more ironic when Issue X turns out to be, say, world peace, or legislative compromise, or some other position diametrically opposed to the very language and tone employed by the arguer. "Be nicer to people, you dumbass!"

    Dylan, in a rare moment of explicitness, intimates this idea bluntly: 

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand 

At the mongrel dogs who teach 

Fearing not that I’d become my enemy 

In the instant that I preach 

    Such a realization of one's own tendency to replace discourse with contempt begs the question: what is the root cause of the over-the-top hand-wringing, arguing, and yelling that defeats the idea of discourse in the first place? Admirably, Dylan self-criticizes, implying that, in the end, his yelling and arguing haven't make the world a better place. And fighting for an issue loses its effectiveness when we lose respect and compassion for our "opponent" (a word loaded with this same kind of irony!): 

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats 

Too noble to neglect 

Deceived me into thinking 

I had something to protect 

    The most famous line of the song is the capstone of each stanza: 

Ah, but I was so much older then 

I’m younger than that now 

    Dylan was only 23 when he wrote this song, and this heightens the temporal dissonance of the line. Here, Dylan is equating age with stubbornness of belief and a lack of empathy with others. The older generation, against whose views he had been protesting, he saw as uncaring elites who ran the country. The youth were protesting for civil rights, for an end to war, for drug legalization, etc. But after coming to the realization that he too was uncaring for the "other" in all of his vitriolic protests, he concludes that he must have been older at that previous time. 

    I don't interpret the song as suggesting that standing up for justice is itself useless; quite the opposite, in fact! Rather, it seems that blindly yelling one's talking points while holding contempt in one's heart for one's fellow human(s) does more harm than good. And if it is "good" that we're fighting for, why don't we first set out to love our "opponent"? And then how about continuing to love and respect them during and after we engage with them? That is how to change hearts and make progress toward justice. And perhaps it will also keep our back pages free of wasted ink.

Lyrics: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/my-back-pages/

Falling and Rising

Turning attention once more to this oft-ignored bastion of dilettantism, I blow on dusty serifs, adjust listing margins, and wipe down the photo header in the misapprehension that a new offering may induce company to come calling. If you, dear reader, have stumbled through Google's back pages to find a nook so tiny as to single-handedly double its readership, I, in turn and in turns, thank, bless, and pity you. May God have mercy on your soul.

And he certainly does, which brings me to the nexus of this effort. Over the past few weeks, "Fallen Down," a tune by rock trio Gov't Mule, has found its way into my thoughts and lodged itself between my unconscious and conscious selves, that penumbral region of malleable grey matter known better as "conscience". Why has a pop song, and this one in particular, resonated so much of late, I find myself wondering. I respond thricely and thusly: (a) pop songs are earworms, and "Fallen Down," as a musical composition, is as close to approachable as Gov't Mule ventures, (b) the song's lyrics describe ingenerate human struggles quite viscerally, especially in the areas of human weakness and regret, and (c) those lyrics offer an opportunity for subversive interpretation beyond, and in contrast to, their surface meaning. 

All music is intended to provoke the listener in some capacity. Those compositions which succeed deserve recognition and an accompanying deeper exploration, if not loquacious over-indulgence.

Falling

The lyrics of "Fallen Down" tell the tale of a sordid life from the perspective of old age. The singer, in the role of prosecutor, presents a biographical portrait of the subject to the subject, connecting how the man's youthful folly and maltreatment of his peers have left him lonely and regretful. The singer notes that the price of egoistic fulfillment during the man's heyday was to lack what he ultimately seeks now: connection.

A sampling of the man's treatment of others is provided:

Target practice with other people's lives
Hit a few right between the eyes
But, most of the time, you were wounded by the ricochet
You say play to win, boys, never play to lose
Long as you're playing, boy, you're bullet-proof
But think about it - you're bleeding to death anyway

Using people for one's own ends takes many forms, such as befriending someone solely to enhance one own's clout, taking advantage of a friend's generosity, and still baser manipulations and abuses. But while its manifestations may differ in kind, its effects carry a common subtext: in the end, such relationships do not, nor can they, persevere. The transacted party ends up discarded, the abuser ends up debased, and one or both end up hurt.

This ambivalence toward others was intended to enrich the man, at least temporarily, but the realized gain is found to be worthless:

And you have fallen down, down from the heavens

Stuck out in the desert

Amazing grace - such a lonely place

For heroes like you and me

Fallen down, just like a shooting star

With no fallen angel standing by

To carry you away

Even his corruptible friends, or "fallen angels," have abandoned him. He is left with memories of loss made more tangible by his actual loneliness or abandonment in later life.

Rising

It is a great irony that the optimism innate to the American Project, e.g. the belief that anyone can prosper through hard work and determination, finds no home in many American art forms. The blues is a prime example. Developing as it did out of the experiences of slavery in the 1800s and of abject poverty through the early and mid-1900s, the blues has always been an expression of pain and helplessness. 

Gov't Mule's musical style, borrowing heavily from the blues, provides them license to write songs in a similar tradition; that is without the happy endings common to most popular music. "Fallen Down" is a perfect example.  

However, while some see only despair and loss in a song whose denouement refuses to resolve happily, I see an opportunity and an invitation. Songs such as "Fallen Down," and the blues in general, offer an opportunity for the listener to participate in the creative process with the singer by inviting the listener to append a suitable epilogue through their own lives. 

The lyrics of "Fallen Down" do not need to be the final chapter of the man's life, and so by extension, the end of anyone's life story. Each listener has an opportunity to live their own life in a way that uplifts other people instead of in a way that reduces their dignity, as the man in the lyrics lived. In a sense, this cautionary tale of falling down should inspire us to instead rise up. It calls us to identify those areas of our lives in which we are compulsive users - of ourselves, of other people, of things -  and to initiate positive change instead. It calls us to seek forgiveness when we fall down, and to offer it freely to others when they do too. It calls us to follow our conscience instead of our ego. And if we find ourselves, as the man did, regretting past mistakes, it tells us that so long as we have breath, our story has not reached its last page. We can still be forgiven, loved, accepted, and dignified. We can still forgive, love, accept, and dignify others.

In essence, a song like "Fallen Down" only tells half of a story. It is a sort of meta "call and response," to borrow from blues parlance. The call of injustice personified lyrically by the man's life demands a response by us, the listeners, in our own lives and communities. The song leaves us to finish the tale in whichever way we choose; not musically, but in reality. We're called, therefore, to join this musical composition and our own lives into a single story, and to live our days in such a way that when an author pens a story about our lives, the last chapter will have been beautifully written in advance.

A View from Just West of Hollywood

The 61st Grammy nominations were released today, and while the list of popular artists whom I cannot recognize continues to expand, I am reminded of the events of the 43rd Grammy Awards.

That was the year in which Steely Dan's brilliant comeback album Two Against Nature upset Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP in the lofty category "Album of the Year".  Complaints were registered, the Grammys were again pronounced dead, and a young man in Virginia couldn't believe his eyes and ears.

One of the top three albums I own, Two Against Nature is a tour de force of jazz/blues/rock that improved on Steely Dan's already impeccable career. Relying on even more obscure reference material than their 1970s fare, the duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker crafted oblique story-telling around metaphors as varied as New Orleans voodoo (title track) and 1940s cinema ("Gaslighting Abbie"). Commenting on the musicality of the album, Fagen admitted that Two Against Nature dove more into the jazz side of their musical swimming pool, and tracks like "Almost Gothic" and "Negative Girl", whose charts are about as complex as Charlie Parker tunes, confirm this.

But it is the denouement of the album which I find instructive even today, and hence prescient in its own time. "West of Hollywood" is an upbeat cut of some 4 minutes with a surprisingly apropos coda of an additional 3 minutes during which Chris Potter discovers and reinterprets John Coltrane inside of a pop tune (albeit one with a far more interesting rhythm section).

The lyrics of "West of Hollywood" tell a story the listener can reliably follow, though the vocabulary and phrasing still retain Steely Dan's patented cryptic tone. The protagonist reminisces about a fling he started on holiday. The new couple loses themselves in thoughtless indulgence, first metaphorically, but then later in reality:

Just a thrill away from punching through to the cosmic wow 
It started out good 
Then it got lots better 
Makin' up the rules as we went along 

And there's the rub. "Makin' up the rules" can often be a recipe for disaster. Thinking not about right and wrong, but only about what churns out dopamine can blind us to what is truly good for us and bind us to what is ultimately bad for us. And so as the story continues, just when the couple has found a kind of superficial perfection, they receive some grave news. As a result of their fling, they have both been afflicted by some seedy side effect. It isn't apparent whether the culprit is drugs, disease, or something else, but it's implied that the fling itself, i.e. the source of their euphoria, was in the end the very cause of their downfall. And so the protagonist must come to terms with their new reality,

Look in my eyes 
Can't you see the core is frozen? 
You can't ask me to access the dreams I don't have now 
Sadly for us 
Our little talk is over 
So together we'll endure the tyranny of the disallowed

In the end, the protagonist is left with a three minute sax solo under which to contemplate why he finds himself, "way deep into nothing special, riding the crest of a wave breaking just west of Hollywood".

Thankfully for us, the story doesn't end with our mistakes or past failings. We are promised remission from even our most egregious faults. With Christmas approaching, we have a wonderful opportunity to consider how to become better people. We can ask ourselves:

What have we indulged in which later became an object of regret? (Hershey's Kisses is a valid answer). Do we learn from our mistakes? Do we treat ourselves with the same dignity and love with which we treat others? Do we forgive ourselves?

As Catholics, we know that Christ's coming has ended the tyranny of the disallowed. That's the Great News!

Celebrating in an "In-Between" World

Though often overlooked by Catholics, the first Sunday of Advent marks the start of a new liturgical year. At Mass last Sunday, i.e. the final Sunday of the previous liturgical year, Catholics celebrated the Feast of Christ the King with readings focusing appropriately on apocalyptic themes. This Sunday began the season of Advent, whose Latin root means "coming". Interestingly, the readings of the first Sunday of the new year are also apocalyptic. While perhaps strange on the surface, these selections are intentional and fitting, for Advent serves not only as a memorial of the historical coming of Jesus as man into human history 2000 years ago, but it also celebrates the current Advent in which we find ourselves today.

This present Advent is our preparation for a different "coming" of Christ; not his Incarnation but his Second Coming, the Parousia (from ancient Greek meaning "coming"). These two terms, Advent and Parousia, precede different historical events; one which occurred 2000 years ago and one which will occur at the end of this age. Catholics can readily identify with the Jewish people of the Hebrew Scriptures who anticipated the "coming" of the promised Messiah. We can also find solidarity with Jewish people of today who, like us, await Christ's coming.

To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we find ourselves in an "in-between" world. While Sagan's context referred only to the constant changes of the physical world, the Catholic sense of our present "in-between" world adds to that our own persistent development into holy people. Our aim is to prepare for the Parousia with hope. What a momentous opportunity this Advent season could provide us.

(As an aside, "liturgical year" makes far more sense than, say, "school year". We celebrate the liturgy every week of the actual year. Those pupils referring to nine-month-long school terms as "years" had better be attending one of those gilded ivies on Earth's nearest neighbor.)

H/T to Fr. Rolyn at Christ the King in Mesa, AZ whose homily today informed much of this post's content.

Of Things Foregone...

Drive west on Interstate 10 from Phoenix to L.A. and you'll pass a cornucopia of interesting highway towns situated between the nation's 2nd and 6th largest cities. From Quartzsite and my personal favorite, Brenda, on the Arizona side, across the Mountain-Pacific divide to Coachella's Indio and Ray Kroc's San Bernardino on the California side. If you find yourself in the mood for southwestern small town Americana, this is a drive that shouldn't be missed. Bathed in nearly year-round sunshine and paved with nary a bend, the journey proves satisfying to even the most nervous of drivers.

The southern terminus of Joshua Tree National Park abuts the freeway and offers the naturalist a more meditative milieu than the 350 miles of rubberized asphalt that appears on maps to underline it. Just north of the park is another sleepy town of nondescript, and thus eminently American, character: that of Twentynine Palms.

With a growing population currently estimated around 25,000, inclusive of the Marines stationed there, it's not difficult to understand why the town's name derives not from a tally of local denizens, but instead from a tally of palm trees that (perhaps) naturally occur and were spotted by a Col. Henry Washington (if that's not a classic American name, I don't know what is) in 1852 as he surveyed the area for the military.

Twentynine Palms exists in an elevated desert climate, with lots of sunshine, hot summer days, and cool winter nights. In an ironic-to-me twist, I first learned about this slice of American apple pie not from that other American standby, i.e. my television, but instead from a Brit. A very famous Brit indeed. Robert Plant, best known as the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, released the aptly titled, "29 Palms" off of his sixth post-Zep solo album, 1993's Fate of Nations.

If you're at all familiar with Led Zeppelin's catalog, you could be forgiven for not recognizing the pop sensibility of Plant's solo releases. In those, he eschewed the complex, distortion-driven, straight-ahead rock sound Led Zeppelin perfected in the 70's in favor of a more introspective, nuanced, and if we're being honest, radio-friendly pop sound.

The song in question is a clever retelling of two star-crossed lovers whose love started with a spark and ended just as quickly (stop me if you've heard such a song before). What makes the song interesting to me, besides the beautiful, yet simple musicality of the piece, is that the two protagonists, Plant, autobiographically, and crooner Alannah Myles, are themselves famous musicians who had previously toured together through the southwest.. How a Baggie and a southern belle found themselves together in a dusty, southwestern American town highlights the sort of cultural intersections which rock 'n roll has enabled over the past 60 years. Whether through the mixing of blues with country, guitars with jazz instrumentation, or blacks with whites, rock 'n roll has covertly broken down barriers and made beautiful concoctions from a host of seemingly disparate ingredients.

When we hear Plant open the song with, "A fool in love, a crazy situation. Her velvet glove knocks me down and down and down," we're instantly clued in to whom Plant is referring; i.e. Myles and her critically acclaimed smash, 1989's "Black Velvet". By referencing a fellow rock star so early in the song, Plant starts off with a bang. But while starting off with a bang in any pursuit, romantic or otherwise, can be exhilarating, it also portends that it could be all downhill from here. And so it is, as Plant foreshadows, "Her kiss of fire, a loaded invitation." Uh oh.

The rest of the first verse (yes, all of those changing fortunes happen in one half of one verse!) as well as the entire second describe the thrill of his attraction to her. But then comes the payoff. The refrain is at once heartbreaking for anyone who's ever loved and lost, as well as heartwarming as he remembers the good, albeit brief, experiences with her on the road:

It comes kinda hard when I hear your voice on the radio
Taking me back down the road that leads back to you
29 Palms, I feel the heat of your desert heart
Taking me back down the road that leads back to you

The confluence here of person (Myles), place (Twentynine Palms), and time (the past) paints a beautiful, yet somber, picture of the reminiscence of joy and the crushing blow of loss ("it comes kinda hard," after all). Plant's competing sense of joy and loss are triggered by her "voice on the radio," (i.e. "Black Velvet"), forcing him to remember their time together touring through Twentynine Palms. Who among us cannot relate to the sounds (and sights and smells) of happy memories? They are at once joyful in having come to us, yet sorrowful in having left us.

Romantic relationships, in particular, have tentacles that do not quickly unhook after a formal parting. The breakup cliche, "you'll always be a part of me," has some truth to it according to Plant. Perhaps Twentynine Palms is his attempt at detaching the final vestiges of his former relationship with Myles. Or perhaps it serves as a memorial to past joys. Or perhaps it's just a catchy pop tune. In any case, it's a gem.

Know Thyself

Ancient Greece was big on proverbs. "Know thyself," is one of 147 aphorisms found inscribed in the Greek City of Delphi, this one at the Temple of Apollo. It is a peculiarity of humanity to devour bits of advice of variable quality in small doses. From time to time, we all just read news headlines, browse Facebook updates, or follow Twitter trends to access information. This is why long-form journalism is a forlorn occupation and why NFL RedZone exists. Humans want dense subject matter presented in small packages that are easy to remember and understand. Complexity and subtlety are hard.

I particularly find "Know Thyself" to be that rare aphorism that is actually worth remembering and applying. For starters, it's something that any human can do relatively well, requiring no discernible skill (except maybe discernment). One needs no external equipment, professorial input, nor large investment of time. Further, it can be done at any hour of the day or night, on any day of the year, and in any place. The results can be kept in secret or shared publicly, and there is only a single criterion for success or failure: whether one has learned anything about oneself.

But, aphorisms will always be aphorisms (great aphorism!). They will always look and sound trite to the cynic and false to the skeptic until one actually tries using them.

If knowing oneself is not a shocking piece of advice, what about a thing knowing itself? Is that even possible? The answer, surprisingly, is.... yes. And what is this magical thingy that knows itself? I'll let Dr. Carl Sagan take it from here:

The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.



Let that sink in... Everything we see when we look at the sky, or the ground, or our dinner, or ourselves has traveled billions of miles over billions of years to right where we are now. How lucky those atoms are. If we humans are special creatures, and I certainly believe we are, how much more special is the cosmos and its laws...and its Creator...because of the fact that the plasma expelled into spacetime 14.5 billion years ago pooled into atoms, which fused into heavy elements, which have combined to make everything we see or ever could see. And we, as the cosmos, can study the cosmos: we can study the very thing we are. The cosmos can know itself. How amazing is that...

Google crashes

According to a report in the USA Today, Google has reported that eleven accidents have occurred over the life of its self-driving car program. While that number might seem like a lot, in reality it amounts to one accident every 155,000 miles driven.

Accidents occurred both in the self-drive mode as well as when there were actual humans piloting the vehicles.  The question thus becomes, 'whose auto insurance covers an accident driven by two automatons?' I'll have to Google to find out.