12: The Return (IV)

IV: Venus

We usually pretend that words are neat little signs which point at things. The word "elephant" points at a great big thing with a trunk and floppy eats and a disconcerting tendency to hide in rooms where embarrassing subjects aren't being discussed. That's because we've agreed to use "elephant" to mean "big grey pachyderm". We might have agreed to use "elephant" to mean "skinny blueberry muffin" or "counter-reformation". The staff in Starbucks get confused if I ask for a tall Americano and an elephant, but "gay" means "joyful" whatever the confirmed bachelor lobby want to pretend it means.

If I say "the cat was lapping up the cream" you think of a little furry thing that likes sitting on mats. But if I say "the cat was laying down some hep riffs, man" you spot that I'm talking about a fashionable black American from the 1950s, and not a furry animal at all. But for some reason, if I say "Blackbeard punished the sailor with the cat" you don't imagine the pirate thumping someone over the head with a jazz saxophonist. Or maybe you do.

Suppose I write a story in which the main character sees a whale. You know what I mean by "whale". Big fish shaped chap, lives in the sea, squirts water out of its head. But when I say "whale" you don't only think of the big swimmy mammal: you also think of Jonah, who was swallowed by one; and Ahab, who chased one; and hippies, who want to save them. And you probably also think of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home which probably made you think of Moby Dick. And One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing and Pinochio – which were intended to make you think of Jonah, whatever intended means.

If I'm a clever author, I probably know that if a guy in my story goes hunting a whale, then you'll probably think of Captain Ahab. But Moby Dick is such a big famous story that it will spill over into my little story whether I intend it to or not.

A lot of perfectly sensible people thought that the title of the movie "The Passion of the Christ" meant "The Really Strong Feelings of the Christ", "How the Christ Got Really Really Angry" or even "The Love Affair of the Christ." Once upon a time "He loved her passionately" meant "He loved her so much it hurt". But we don't use the word "Passion" in that sense any more. And poor Mel couldn't stop the title meaning a thing he didn't want it to mean, however much he say at home in his room "intending" really, really hard.

It would be very nice if words and symbols all contained nice little nuggets of meaning, in the same way that Christmas puddings contained sixpences. But they don't. They mean lots of different things, and when you put them next to other words, which also mean lots of different things, they mean even more different things. Most of the time, the best we can do is pay attention to who is saying them, and to whom, and where and why and when and make a sort of guess as the kinds of things they probably mean this time.

This is scary and disconcerting and counter-intuitive. People with Aspergers, I'm told, find it particularly hard to deal with. Why, they ask, can't people just say what they damn well mean?

The totemic text during my English degree was not The Golden Bough or Hero With a Thousand Faces or The Interpretation of Dreams: it was Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory. I can't remember if I read that, either. 


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12: The Return (III)

III: Mercury

I don't really think that Bob Dylan lyrics are impervious to analysis.

I think that Visions of Johanna works as a lyric because Dylan has chosen to put particular words next to other words. Those words – their sounds, their meanings, the way other writers have used them – affect the listener in particular ways. If he had chosen different words, the words would effect us differently.

I don't think that you can decode the songs and say what they mean. I don't think that Bob set out to tell a naturalistic story about how he was once in bed with a prostitute named Louise but was all the time thinking about a former girlfriend named Johanna, but decided, for some reason, to present the story in the form of a riddle. I don't think that Mr T.S Eliot wrote a story about a bank clerk who felt depressed after the First World War and / or the Quest for the Holy Grail and decided, for some reason, to present the story in the form of a cryptic crossword clue. (It is at least arguable that Mr Don Mclean did set out to write about the history of American pop music since 1959 but chose to present it under a series of oblique symbols, which is why Visions of Johanna is a work of genius and American Pie is a quite good pop song.)

I think that Dylan's poetry is driven by sound, not meaning; and by association of images; not logical or narrative structure.

I think that the only possible answer to the question "Why can't the jelly-faced woman find her knees?" is "Because freeze rhymes with knees."

I think that this is a very risky strategy for a lyricist to adopt. We can just about see why Bob's girlfriend Angelina made him want to listen to the music of the concertina and that she looks like a goddess with the head of a hyena, but when she turns out to be the most beautiful woman between here and Argentina and Judges start issuing subpoenas, we are inclined to think that a certain amount of the piss is being taken. (Which may have been why Dylan didn't release "Angelina", of course.)

I think that it is very hard to write convincing gibberish. Dylan comes up with lines like "The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face" which appear to make sense, but don't. If you or I tried it, we would write "Skin yourself alive, learn to speak Arapaho / Climb inside a dog, and behead an Eskimo" which makes the wrong kind of sense and is therefore funny, but not very. 

I do not think that any logical process connects "Outside the museum, infinity goes up on trial" with "Voices echo: this is what salvation must be like after a while" and "Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles". I do think that the strong rhymes make us look for, and therefore find, the non-existent connections. 

I think, but only tentatively, that the words ghost, electricity, howls, bones, face are best thought of as an unconnected series of images and sounds, and the words "the" "in" and "of" are there to lull us into thinking that they must make some kind of sense.

I don't think that if we attend to them in the right spirit, possibly under the influence of Freud or illegal substances, we will be able to discern the secret language of Dylan's imagery, in which "Johanna = Buddy Holly", "Louise = Your Mum" and "Country Music = The Oedipus Complex."

I think that as soon as our mind is confronted with a sequence of words, images or sentences, it starts to look for connections between them, tries to find a way for them to mean something, tries, as 'puter geeks would say, to "parse" them.


I think that lyrics of this kind drive a wedge between words and the meanings of words. 


I think that lyrics of this kind put us in a state of mind where we feel that words don't just mean one thing, but lots of things. When Bob tells us that "Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule" we find that we can't make the words attach themselves to anything so they flap around in our heads until they find something to latch on to. 


I think that this induces a state of mind in which all sorts of interesting idea and emotions which Bob himself didn't and couldn't know about, leap into our head. 


I think this is probably what Mr William Wordsworth meant about the vernal brook. 

I think that once we have spotted that this is how Visions of Johanna and I Am the Walrus Work, it becomes scarily possible that this is how Moby Dick and Rom: Spaceknight and The House at Pooh Corner work, as well. And Star Wars. Especially Star Wars. 

Mr C.S. Lewis thought that it was silly to pretend Hamlet was a real person, and then try to explain is behaviour realistically. He thought it made more sense to look at the actual words which Shakespeare gave the actor to speak, and to consider how those words generate a particular kind of ambiguity whereby everybody who reads Hamlet creates their own Hamlet in their heads but truly believes that he found that Hamlet, and only that Hamlet, in the poem.

If the doors of perception were opened every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. I think Abraham Lincoln said that.

The question to ask about a poem is not "what does it mean" but "how does it mean"? I said that.

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The Mankind Project.

12: The Return

I: The Sun

have an aversion to combining sweet and savoury flavours and in particular an aversion to combining food from the sea with food from the land

before jesus came and put a stop to it the jews were not allowed to cook a lobster in its mothers milk which is proved by the reference to fish fingers and custard in doctor who roses are redd-ish violets are blu-eish

since babylonian times school children have been given milk puddings as a dessert which they have always hated what is the matter with mary jane shes perfectly well and she hasnt a pain what a shame mary jane had a pain at the party

shakespeare said that tinned fish represented sexuality fools are as like to husbands as pilchards are to herrings the husbands the bigger

if we trouble to learn the secret language of the school-yard we will easily discern that the semolina pilchard straddles the boundary between land and sea fish and cow first course and pudding male and female nice and nasty sensible and silly this is the same as the jungian archetype of the fool which i am almost sure is in the tarot deck somewhere

so when the semolina pilchard tries to ascend the phallic axis of the world we see that true wisdom can only be achieved through the path of stupidity the eiffle tower is in paris paris makes me think of the judgement of paris which is in greek mythology somewhere

also the penguins chant hindu mantras about the dancing child who taught arjun the bhagavad gita so the penguins represents the combination of south with east black with white chocolate with cream biscuit with little coloured bits of silver foil

expert textpert choking smoker don't you see the joker laughs at you

II: The Moon

Campbell begins Hero With a Thousand Faces with a spectacularly inane passage from Freud. When a child asks where the new baby came from, his parents will sometimes say "The stork brought her".  But this isn't, it seems, where babies really come from. "We are telling the truth in symbolic clothing" says Siggy "For we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it."

This, for Freud, is a bit like religion. God doesn't exist, any more than the Stork exists, but babies certainly exist and they certainly come from somewhere. God, like the Stork, "stands for" some truth. But the symbols in practice "distort" and "conceal" whatever truths they once represented. In any case, it's a bad idea to lie to children: better to dispense with the Stork metaphor altogether and tell the little darlings about erections and ejaculation and spermatozoa as soon as they are old enough to ask.

Campbell obviously likes the idea that the story of Mr Stork disguises the facts of reproduction. The purpose of Hero With a Thousand Faces is to "uncover some of the truth disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology" – to get past the Stork of mythology and reveal the messy truth that lies behind it. But he doesn't seem to think that stork-type stories are lies that it would have been better never to have told in the first place; lies which can be thrown away once we are ready for the truth. He rather thinks that we ought to reverently and respectfully study the Stork so that eventually the big secret will reveal itself to us.

But it won't. There is no possible way that any amount of study of the Stork could possibly tell us what really happens in the maternity ward even if we swallow the idea that the Bird represents Mummy's Belly and that dropping the baby down the chimney represents the newborn's passage through the vagina which I assume we don't. Everyone but Freud – including the very small child who originally asked where his sister came from – understands that "The stork brought you" isn't a symbol, or a lie, or a myth or even a euphemism, but a polite refusal to answer the question, a form of words which means "I'm not going to tell you yet", like when you asked Granny how old she was and she replied "As old as my tongue, and a little bit older than my teeth."

The Stork is, in fact, a social construct in which a group of people in a particular society at a particular time agree that the bird will represent childbirth. Watch the opening minutes of Dumbo; look at the behaviour of storks in real life; do an art history analysis of twee Christening cards; compare stork-stories in America with stork-stories in the African basin. You will never discover the Truth about how babies are made. Because it just isn't there.

Your Sunday School teacher probably told you that Jesus preached in parables to enable his audience to understand him. In fact, he specifically said that he preached in parables to prevent his audience from understanding him.

In Mr William Wordsworth's poem Anecdote for Fathers, the narrator repeatedly asks a child why he prefers his new house to his old one. The child, who doesn't know, eventually claims that he likes the new house because it has a weather-cock and the old one didn't. In Mr Jim Henson's television show Sesame Street a character named Big Bird tried to understand why the old storekeeper (who has, in fact, died) will never come back, and is told by one of the adult characters "It has to be this way because."

Weather cocks, storks, giant yellow budgies: clearly large birds always represent unanswerable questions.




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