Mother Trees: The Forest Is Intelligent, and It "Cares"!
The Dragon's Tale
Pale Blue Dot: The Farthest Voyager
Who Knows Where the Time Goes? Part 1
Who Knows Where the Time Goes? Part 2
Twenty Poems Could Save America?
Is Bob Dylan Really a Poet? Part One -- A Personal Reflection on Dylan as Poet
My first reaction to hearing that Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” was a sense of unreality and disbelief. I’ve always loved Dylan’s lyrics – the words were such a large part of the songs. So many of his words are evocative and powerful enough to move me physically. I had certainly come to view many of his lyrics as eloquent and often beautiful poetry. But a Nobel Prize? I wondered who else was nominated, but they’re not listed on the Nobel website.
Most people know the Dylan songs that have been on the radio. But a great many of his best songs out of an amazing output aren’t well known beyond diehard Dylan fans. When the question of whether Bob Dylan’s lyrics are poetry arises, I immediately think of a point in time around ten years ago when I recall typing the lyrics to “Mr Tambourine Man” in my computer and realizing how good they were as spoken poetry. Everyone knows the refrain, of course, but I had come to love the verses, being somewhat worn out on the refrain. The lines would spontaneously erupt and play over and over in my mind. They became richer as I began reading them out loud as poetry, often to myself, occasionally to others, like poets on a Bill Moyers PBS series did years ago like Robert Bly, Joy Harjo, Sharon Olds, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. Without the pitch of the notes and the melody, the words took on a richness of their own with a different feel than the songs.
Though I know that evening’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming . . .
Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
my toes too numb to step, wait only for my bootheels
To be wandering
. . . cast your dancing spell my way
I promise to go under it
. . . And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time it’s just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn’t pay it any mind
It’s just a shadow you’re seeing that he’s chasing
And the entire last verse:
Then take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow
There’s rhyme in the sense of the repetition of sounds in various ways, often rhyming in the middle of the line, but there’s no regular pattern after the interesting scheme in the initial stanza. The lyrics read aloud have a wonderfully fluid rhythm not constrained by the beat of the song, and the words flow with the rhythm in vivid imagery. The line “To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free” just soars. “The haunted, frightened trees” haunted me. “Take me disappearing . . . down the foggy ruins of time” was a trip I wanted to join. And though the refrain had become tired for me, it perked up when I read it with emphasis on “Hey”, as in “HEY, Mr Tambourine Man”, and accenting “Man” slightly rather than the last syllable of “tambourine”, so it sounded fresh. And now I love the last line: “In the jingle-jangle morning I’ll come following you.”
Some people thought the song was about an LSD trip, as they did with the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”, but I always had the sense that the Tambourine Man was Dylan’s muse, and he was describing the euphoria of the creative imagination. No matter who you think the T-Man is, the lyric is an ode to ecstatic experience, like the echo of a Rumi poem.
“I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine” is another song that creates waves in my soul when I read it as poetry. It opens with a dream that sets the drama right away, with the saint in a futile quest:
I dreamed I saw St Augustine, alive as you or me
Tearing through these quarters
In the utmost misery
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold
Searching for the very souls
Whom already have been sold
Carrying the wealth of the church, he’s searching in vain and misery for souls to save, because they’ve already been sold and are lost. In the second verse he calls out to “ye gifted kings and queens . . . in a voice without restraint” to “hear my sad complaint” that there is no martyr with the clarity and conviction to the point of death who could serve as moral compass among them “whom you can call your own”. He then reassures them:
But go on your way accordingly
And know you’re not alone
Then comes the jolting, heart-rending last verse:
I dreamed I saw St Augustine
Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
Who put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger
So alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried
He wakes in anger, “so alone and terrified” at what he’s done. In fact, St Augustine died a peaceful death of at an advanced age of natural causes, but the song is describing a dream, and it’s poetic license. Dylan’s writing poetry, not history. It’s been said that poetry and fiction are “lies that tell the truth”. Dylan is ever the moralist, according to his own very personal code, judging himself as well as others. He shifts back and forth from compassion to judgment, but his lyrics are filled with the themes of right and wrong. When I read or hear that last line, it touches a well of grief somewhere deep inside. It goes deeper into me because there’s no excess of emotion, no melodrama in his subdued voice. Dylan’s pitch and volume drop quietly in despair through the line, as if it’s left him empty. The imagery of “I put my fingers against the glass/And bowed my head and cried” conveys the wretchedness of his emotional state – a dream so real it’s torn his soul. I don’t know if Dylan dreamed and felt what he described or it’s an achievement of his imagination, but it’s a deep dive into a well of grief that has never failed to move me after more than fifty years of listening to and reading it. For me, it’s the most heart-felt thing he ever wrote, notwithstanding all the poignant topical songs he’s written that touch me deeply, at least until he gets to the broken love songs of 1974’s Blood on the Tracks.
Considering Dylan as poet begs a look at “Chimes of Freedom” from the transition album Another Side of Bob Dylan. It’s at once a lament,; an ode to the mistreated, lonely, wounded and overlooked of the world; and an anthem of the struggle against oppression. Each of six verses ends with “And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing,” an optimism he abandoned later in life for “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” There’s one memorable line after another in the song. These four lines end the first verse:
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
And for each and every underdog soldier in the night
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The chimes of freedom are
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless seeking trail,
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
And for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed and laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time, and we watched with one last look
Spellbound and swallowed till the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones, whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse
And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
It’s an eloquent expression of compassion for the marginalized people of the world, and it’s hard to resist not quoting more. The line “For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale” is a line I’d give my right arm to have written. “Warriors whose strength is not to fight” echoes the protesters who fought the draft in the 60s, some of whom went to jail like Joan Baez’s husband David Harris. “Refugees on the unarmed road of flight” are in the world news every day all over the world. And I love “countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse/An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe” to cap off the song. As in “Mr Tambourine Man” the fluid rhythm of the lines is part of the poetry of the song/poem.
Brett Nelson
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Is Bob Dylan Really a Poet? Part Two -- A Personal Reflection on Dylan as Poet, continued
In many of Bob Dylan’s early songs, there is an ironic twist in the last verse that gives added power to the lyrics, like a punchline. In “With God on Our Side”, he runs through a litany of American wars starting with the de facto war on the native population for two centuries or more documented so thoroughly by Dee Brown in his book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Noting how he’s taught to abide the law “And that the land that I live in/Has God on its side,” the lyric parrots the accepted wisdom of all our wars, mirroring how nations throughout history have always justified their wars in the name of religion. But each verse highlights the irony of "With God on our side" juxtaposed with the ungodlike.
. . . The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side
After noting the Spanish-American War and Civil War, he homes in on World Wars I and II:
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don’t count the dead
When God’s on your side
When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And then we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side
He’s “learned to hate the Russians/All through my whole life,”
But now we got weapons
Of chemical dust
If fire them we’re forced to
Then fire them we must . . .
And you never ask questions
When God’s on your side
He then turns away from the mirroring the conventional mindset of accepted wisdom in an abrupt shift that says “But I can’t think for you/you’ll have to decide/Whether Judas Iscariot/Had God on his side,” and ends with
So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war
begging the question of whether there is a God and if so, just what God's role in the cosmos is. With each verse you feel the painful recognition of the emptiness in our rationalizations of every war propped up by a religion built from the life of a gentle pacifist Jewish prophet who would not recognize his teaching in the uses of the religion that bears his name. The twist in the last two verses cuts like a knife through the hypocrisy, the punchline with the impact of naked, painful truth and poetic power.
He uses the same device in several other songs from his early career. In “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, a song he wrote from reading a newspaper article with some inaccuracies that recounted a prolonged abusive and obscene diatribe for no apparent reason at a black waitress during a banquet, as well as a hard blow on her shoulder, by a rich young tobacco farm owner – resulting in the woman’s death, while the other guests sit around the table doing and saying nothing. He describes the incident through four long verses, at the end of the first three admonishing us
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears
In the fourth verse he tells us that William Zanzinger is convicted (not in a jury trial but by a panel of three judges, actually of manslaughter after the judges changed the original charge of murder), but the judge
To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level . . .
And that the ladder of the law has no top and no bottom . . .
Handed out strongly for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six month sentence
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now’s the time for your tears
Each verse relates things that are good cause for tears, but Dylan’s point is that the unequal application of the law between races and the haves and have-nots is what allows abuse to perpetuate itself. The searing irony of “. . . that the ladder of the law has no top and no bottom” and “To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level . . . Handed out strongly for penalty and repentance” highlights the hypocrisy of what Dylan sees as a slap on the face (writing from the story as reported originally that Carroll died from being beaten with a cane. It was later revealed the cane was a toy and she died from a brain hemorrhage as a result of Zanzinger’s abuse). But despite the misinformation, it’s a heartbreakingly story movingly related. (Full details on Wikipedia.)
“Only a Pawn in Their Game” about the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi in the 60s chronicles how those who wielded power in the South manipulated poor whites who weren’t much better off economically than their black counterparts into supporting segregation and perpetrating racial violence in lynchings and other abuses. The first verse recounts Evers’ murder by a nameless killer, “But he can’t be blamed/He’s only a pawn in their game”. The first four verses end with “He’s only a pawn in their game”, underscoring the point of view that “Southern politicians” and law enforcement officials are the ones ultimately responsible for segregation and Southern racial violence. The last verse twists the metaphor as it recounts Evers’ burial with the refrain that he was sadly “only a pawn in their game” as well.
Even in a song of lost love like “Boots of Spanish Leather” the device is used to good effect as the man rejects three offers by a lover sailing the seas to send “something fine/Made of silver or of golden” to remember her by,
Oh how can, how can you ask me again
It only brings me sorrow
The same thing I want from you today
I would want again tomorrow
I got a letter on a lonesome day
It was from her ship a-sailin
Sayin I don’t know when I’ll be comin back again
It depends on how I’m feelin
Well if you, my love, must think that-a-way
I’m sure your mind is a-roamin
I’m sure your heart is not with me
But with the country to where you’re goin
So take heed, take heed, of the western wind
Take heed of stormy weather
And yes, there’s something you can send back to me
Spanish boots of Spanish leather
He realizes that she’s not ever coming back to him, and at that point you can feel the sinking sensation in his heart as he changes his mind to ask her to send him “Spanish boots of Spanish leather”, either as a futile attempt to hang onto a piece of her or an unsentimental “I might as well get something out of this.” “I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine” and the love song “To Ramona” (Part 3} have similar shifts in their last verses that cement the power of the lyrics.
Dylan’s lyrics took a decidedly different turn with Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, although the transition was gradually
in the works on the pointedly-titled Another Side of Bob Dylan, and on Bringing It All Back Home. He stepped away from being spokesman for the oppressed under his discomfort with the god-like expectations his fan base had for him. As the Beatles left the concert stage in retreat from the insane hysteria about them, Dylan, excited by the music the Beatles made, switched to largely electric rock-and-roll and began to turn out lyrics that expressed what for me was the dark strangeness of the times. He owned a growing fear for his own safety at the time, and when 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways was released he expressed how much he was shaken by JFK’s assassination. The intense anger of much of his fan base at his switch away from acoustic topical songs to electric rock-and-roll must have been disturbing too, though he reacted to that mostly with defiance – once on tour in England in 1966 telling his band, who later became The Band, to play louder to drown out the screaming protest of fans – one of whom can be heard famously screaming “Judas!” on the recording.
Even lyrics that don’t express intelligible perceptions and emotions play over and over in my mind like bells ringing their reverberations down into depths that are foreign country to my conscious self. The lovely acoustic “Desolation Row” is a movie-like eleven-minute song on Highway 61 Revisited. With its landscape of strange characters doing bizarre things and famous people and fictional characters in roles and actions out of character for them, it’s always felt to me like the most accurate portrayal of the foreboding craziness of the late 60s and early 70s until the end of the Vietnam War and Nixon’s resignation.
They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor’s filled with sailors
The circus is in town . . .
And the riot squad is restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row
Cinderella she seems so easy
‘It takes one to know one”, she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style . . .
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row
This world is altered and strange and foreboding – watch out for the riot squad! Desolation Row sounds like a place of refuge and safety from what’s happening on the streets. Already I’ve decided I like Cinderella. Ambulances are leaving the scene – cleaning up after the riot squad’s done its work? In the third verse he’s afraid for a repressed Ophelia, to whom “death is quite romantic”, and “her sin is her lifelessness.” She has her sight “fixed upon/Noah’s great rainbow/ But she spends her time peeking/Into Desolation Row”.
The next verse has a demented “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood/With his friend a jealous monk” who “looked so immaculately frightful/As he bummed a cigarette,” and he goes off
. . . sniffing drainpipes
and reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row
I like Dylan’s Einstein a lot. It’s my favorite verse for the humor and for his imagined Einstein’s artistic bent and possibly subversive streak.
Doctor Filth’s “sexless patients” are all trying to blow up his world, but “His nurse . . . is in charge of the cyanide hole/And she also keeps the cards that read/Have mercy on his soul’” Not a pair I want to see for my medical care. The next verse has the Phantom of the Opera “spoon-feeding Casanova/To get him to feel more assured/Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence/After poisoning him with words . . .”, but “Casanova is just being punished for going/To Desolation Row.” Ah, so Desolation Row is not only a refuge but is forbidden territory, outlaw land to the forces of repression. The following verse is the most chilling in the poem, capturing the cold amorality that power can assume:
At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row
This is Dylan’s 1965 vision of the nightmare we seemed to be headed for in the late 60s in the minds of many, culminating in 68-70 with the assassinations of King and RFK, Daly’s police riot at the 68 Democratic Convention, the Chicago Seven plus a gagged Bobby Seale, Kent State, Nixon’s empty promise to end the war in six months and his demonization of the press. The agents “come out and round up everyone/That knows more than they do” and strap “the heart-attack machine . . . across their shoulders/And then the kerosene” while insurance men “Check to see that nobody is escaping/To Desolation Row.” Knowledge is a capital offense. It’s a dark vision, but the late 60s were dark times, and Dylan was prophetic. In the last verse he complains about someone’s letter asking how he is doing – “Was that some kind of joke.” He’s not doing well in times like these, in this strange, threatening and out-of-control world.
Right now I can’t read too good
Don’t send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row
The song is backed by lilting high-register acoustic guitar-picking throughout that’s almost flute-like. It’s a beautiful, melodic song. As a poem it’s a foreboding and occasionally humorous evocation of a time when it seemed the world was crazy and careening out of control. Even though none of it describes or comments on specific events of the time, “Desolation Row”, along with “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”, comes closer than anything I know to conveying what that time felt like for me.
Is Bob Dylan Really a Poet? Part Three -- A Personal Reflection on Dylan as Poet, continued
Dylan has written much that seems like throwaway verse, as if he wasn’t even trying, just putting some words on paper so he could record a piece of music. And there are songs like “Positively 4th Street” and “Idiot Wind” that are mean-spirited, even downright nasty. “Oh Sister” is Dylan in one of his worst moments, seeming to threaten a woman with God’s disapproval if she doesn’t treat him the way he thinks she should (Baez wrote what is apparently an answer to the song in the wonderful “Oh Brother!” on her excellent Gulf Winds album, in which she takes him eloquently to task for a long history of mistreatment of friends, but with a bit of a loving touch as well). Even “Like a Rolling Stone”, which is a great song, is an unrelenting screed against a woman who apparently thought herself high and mighty but now has plummeted to the bottom, living on the street, and surely warrants a bit of compassion for her plight, but Dylan’s scathing song kicks her when she’s down over four verses.
The phenomenon that is Bob Dylan is an indeterminate number of selves evidenced not only by the number of times he’s reinvented himself but even by the variety of personas he writes from on any given album. In contrast to “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Mama, You Been on My Mind”, an outtake from Another Side of Bob Dylan, is a song/poem that is personal, subdued, uncritical, vulnerable, and asking for nothing. It begins with the laser lines “Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat/Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that/But Mama, you been on my mind”, not knowing why he’s thinking about a woman he loved as he stands at a crossroads. He’s making it plain that he’s not asking for anything and says “I do not walk the floor bowed down and bent, but yet/Mama, you been on my mind”, another wonderful couplet.
He's not heartbroken, but he’s feeling a wistful emptiness at the memory of and loss of a woman who is acutely present in his mind at the moment. “Even though my mind may be hazy/And my thoughts they may be narrow/ Where you been don’t bother me/Or bring me down in sorrow . . ./But Mama, you’re just on my mind.” And then the last verse:
When you wake up in the morning, baby
Look inside your mirror
You know I won’t be next to you
You know I won’t be near
I’d just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
As someone who has had you on his mind
He’s wondering what she might be thinking and feeling about him when she sees herself in her mirror in the morning, and if she can see herself as clearly as he sees himself in this particular moment in time. The last two lines are what stick with me the most. It’s living in the moment with what he thinks and feels that gives him the clarity he has. Like “Tambourine Man” and “Chimes of Freedom”, the words flow like water cascading over smooth rock in a way that bathes the ears.
“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” combines the vulnerability and gentleness of “Mama, You Been on My Mind” with a bit of the mysterious metaphor and surreal imagery of “Desolation Row” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”. It’s a slow eleven-minute song with a simple acoustic guitar, very understated drums and plaintive, longing harmonica and organ that is one of the most beautiful love poems I can think of. It’s an ode to an almost goddess-like figure, not exactly worshiping but certainly placed on a pedestal. It doesn’t idealize the woman in the song but seems to see the whole woman with a deep respect and appreciation of who she is. The first verse with chorus:
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes
And your silver cross and your voice like chimes
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass
Who among them do they think could carry you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I leave them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
That’s a pretty good capsule of the whole lyric. Each of the five verses ends with the last five lines above, contrasting nameless people who don’t appreciate who she is and can’t measure up to her with the singer/Dylan (?) who sees her for who she is with her priceless worth and humbly asks if he should leave his gifts at her gate or wait for her to open it for him. His poetry gives her “eyes like smoke”, a “voice like chimes” and “flesh like silk”; later her ”cowboy mouth”, her eyes “where the moonlight swims”, “your saintlike face and your ghostlike soul”. This is a woman who’s a rare and special bird, and he may not deserve her, but he’ll offer himself humbly and give it a shot, in contrast with others who want to manipulate and use her, which she’s impervious to:
They wished you’d accepted the blame for the farm
But with the sea at your feet and the phony false alarm
And with the child of a hoodlum wrapped up in your arms
How could they ever, ever persuade you?
Webster’s third definition of “elegy” is “any poem, song, etc. in a mournfully contemplative tone”. That describes “Sad-Eyed Lady”, as Dylan is mourning how the woman in the lyric is viewed and treated, but it’s also a love song and an ode to a remarkable soul, said to be about his wife Sara Dylan.
In contrast “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” is dark and bleak, the lament and defiant stand of a man who doesn’t fit in the world he’s in and feels battered at every turn. The first line, “Darkness at the break of noon” sets the tone for perhaps his most bitter song. The verse proclaims ”There is no sense in trying”. The second verse ends with the words “. . . he not busy being born is busy dying”, a famous line that stuck in my head for decades, but I could rarely remember what it was from. Here are stanzas five and six, followed by the “It’s alright Ma” refrain that comes every three verses with somewhat altered wording:
Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred
While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked
And though the rules of the road have been lodged
It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge
And it’s alright, Ma, I can make it
It’s a relentless assault on a mainstream culture he feels disgusted with and assaulted by. I saw Dylan’s 1974 return to the concert stage with The Band, and 20,000 people roared when he sang “But even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked”. Written when Johnson was president, in 1974 Nixon was being shredded by the Watergate hearings. Once more he's prophetic. A bit later he warns to “not forget/That it is not he or she or them or it/That you belong to”, and “I got nothing, Ma, to live up to”. In the next refrain he eases up a bit:
But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him
The lyric ends with the lines
I . . . say Ok, I’ve had enough
What else can you show me?
And if my thought dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only
Each verse ends with a special emphasis on the last or next to last word: sacred, naked, please (him), show (me).The song is a bitter diatribe from a point in his life when he was getting severe criticism for his retreat on Another Side of Bob Dylan from the topical/ political songs of his early albums. But it’s powerful poetry sung in a staccato breakneck pace with a machine-gun-like acoustic rhythm guitar in full-on honest anger. I like it that it ends with “it’s life, and life only,” as if now that he’s got it out of his system, he accepts that it’s just the way life is and he’s not a victim, echoed in an earlier refrain that ends “It’s Alright, Ma, I can take it.”
”To Ramona” from Another Side of Bob Dylan is Dylan at the top of his poetic game. The man in the song is trying to lift the spirits of his lover by talking her out of what he sees as her distorted point of view:
Ramona
Come closer
Shut softly your watery eyes
The pangs of your sadness
Shall pass as your senses will rise
The flowers of the city
Though breathlike
Get deathlike at times
And there’s no use in trying
To deal with the dying
Though I cannot explain that in lines
Your magnetic movements
Still capture the minutes I’m in
But it grieves my heart, love
To see you trying to be a part of
A world that just don’t exist
It’s all just a dream, babe
A vacuum, a scheme, babe
That sucks you into feeling like this
It’s a tender plea to persuade her that her mistaken view of life is what’s causing her pain. He’s sure he sees things more clearly than she does. I love “Your magnetic movements/Still capture the minutes I’m in.” Dylan’s writing here with meter and rhyme that give its vernacular lyric the feel of more traditional poetry in which rhyme and regular meter were the norm. “And there’s no use in trying/To deal with the dying/Though I cannot explain that in lines” is beautiful poetry with a complex rhythm and rhyme scheme that repeats in the last four lines of each verse. In the next verse he tells her
You’ve been fooled into thinking
That the finishing end is at hand
Yet there’s no one to beat you
No one to defeat you
’Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad
But finally in the last stanza he comes to the realization that he can’t reason her into feeling better:
For deep in my heart
I know there’s no help I can bring
Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do
And someday maybe
Who knows, baby
I’ll come and be crying to you
It’s a deflating admission of his powerless to fix her, and the last three lines are the most vulnerable and humble lines Dylan’s ever written. The song is a tender and beautiful love song and lovely poetry.
At first I winced with embarrassment for the Nobel committee when I heard about the Prize going to a singer-songwriter, but Nobel Prizes are awarded to a lot of controversial people. Countless lyrics of his echo over and over in my mind on a regular basis. So do words from “Willie and the Hand Jive” and “Chicken Cordon Blues” sometimes, but so many of Dylan’s are evocative and powerful enough to move the arrangement of the organs in my body. I mean that listening to them makes physical things happen in me, like a deep breath, a sigh, or a quickening pulse. They fill me up. Even lyrics that don’t express intelligible perceptions and actions play over and over in my mind like bells ringing their vibrations down into depths that are foreign country to my conscious self. I’m fascinated with the landscape of characters that float through the streams of consciousness in his surreal lyrics, like Dali paintings with melting clocks, that are as arresting as his most eloquent and moving songs.
There are dozens of poetic lyrics that could be included here: “Dear Landlord”, “Visions of Johanna” (”the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face” – whatever that means, but I love the line), “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, “Simple Twist of Fate”, “If You See Her, Say Hello”, “Girl from the North Country”, “Restless Farewell”, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”, “My Back Pages”, “Hurricane”, I Shall Be Released”, “One Too Mornings”, ” Forever Young” and more. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen exploded the range of lyric territory that “popular” music (as opposed to classical) can cover, and the musical landscape has never been the same.
Poetry is the loving and creative use of language to convey human experience in the hope that a poem will touch a chord in other people, perhaps a universal chord, in a way that connects us to a poet’s vision and to each other. As with all art, it’s an attempt to create something that can bring deep awareness, pleasure and even joy to others. Dylan’s lyrics absolutely do that for me as much as any poet I’ve ever read, including Yeats, Rilke, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, Sandburg, Rumi, Lawrence, Etheridge Knight, Sharon Olds, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. A poet has to be in love with language to do that, and with Dylan it’s worth remembering that poetry was originally always paired with musical accompaniment. In ancient Greece poetry was always sung. What Dylan does with language testifies to his love of language as a poet and his ability to use language to connect us with him and with ourselves.
Brett Nelson
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Twenty Poems Could Save America?
The poet Tony Hoagland published an essay in 2014 titled “Twenty Poems That Could Save America” in his book of the same name. That’s definitely thinking big if you take it at face value, but it may have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek, since he’s an irreverent soul. Likely only slightly tongue-in-cheek, I think. It may sound a little grandiose, but sometimes it’s good to be a little grandiose. At least it gives you a vision of something to reach for, and poetry is a vehicle for that.
Hoagland says things about poetry that I would never have thought to wonder about, and says them so clearly that sometimes I realize I have almost thought something similar just below the level of consciousness or fleeting and barely conscious, and which validates something I have sensed and known but never knew that I knew, just as good poetry often does. His premise in “Twenty Poems” is that we’ve lost something in the American soul by losing touch with poetry as an emotional and intellectual well to draw from and voice to speak from – lost touch because we’re still teaching the same poems we were taught in high school, the same poems our parents and our teachers were taught, and we’ve drained the life out of them for the generations that have come after us, as well as our own.
It's not that they aren’t wonderful poems. But think of the poems that excited you, that turned you on, when you were sixteen or seventeen, before you had to learn what “good poetry” was as presented in your high school textbooks and before you had to grow up and become “practical” to meet the “real world”. Hoagland believes we are most open to poetry in adolescence. Then we have to become “adults,” which is understandable. But we lose touch with something in the process. And poetry hasn’t had much good press in America, until the 1990s with mythopoetic men’s activities and more recently with the emergence of poetry slams. It’s a marginal enthusiasm in American culture, however.
Often our best poems as young people were song lyrics, songs we could listen to over and over and still get the lift they gave to
our spirits or the tears we shed because we felt deeply understood in the words. I also got a brief introduction to other poets in freshman English from an anthology I still have called Twelve Poets, but my poetic sense was then hijacked by Dylan’s and Paul Simon’s song lyrics, then Steve Goodman, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison, and Robert Hunter and a host of others that followed. Poetry originated in song, from ritual tribal chants to Homeric hymns to the choruses in Greek plays through Gregorian chants to the ballads of medieval troubadours.
We are so inundated with the sensational and the mundane and routine, and so driven by time pressure that few of us make time
to sit with what is in our deep emotional selves. Where do most of us feel our passions besides in courtship and spectator sports? Even our music is often loud and frenetic and often vacuous. We need the soul food of poetry to reach below the surface of our lives, and time to sit and contemplate what we find. I think what Hoagland is saying in the title of his essay is that we would be a different nation if most of us connected regularly in our depths with poetry that reaches for the wells of feeling and unconscious wisdom in us.
When I read something or hear a song from someone who uses language like a soaring angel on a good day, I live at least a part of that day with a fuller heart, and life feels good. When I first read Hoagland’s essay and the poems he picked, I started thinking of the poems I would pick that could reach the depths of American’s souls, and I realized I could put together a slate of poems that speak to me in the way I think Hoagland wants his choices to speak to us. I didn’t like some of his choices, but he wouldn’t like some of mine either, I’m sure. It’s not a claim of the twenty best poems – that’s not the point. Not “The Twenty Poems . . . “ but just “Twenty Poems . . .” There may be lots of lists of twenty poems that could “save America.” Any person who loves and has read a lot of poetry could do likewise. Anyone’s list of twenty poems that would awaken the part of the psyche that’s touched by poetry could begin to change the consciousness of America if they were passed around and got other people to read poetry and make their own lists of poems that moved them.
If everyone who reads poetry did the same, and we shared our choices with each other, maybe we could really generate something – an expansion in consciousness in the collective soul of America. So I invite anyone who is so moved to do exactly that, even if you do it just for yourself. But you can share them with friends and family, and me if you like.
Here’s my list (with twenty-one -- I couldn’t pick another one I wanted to cut), but anyone who reads poetry could make their own list. If you're interested, you can look them up and read them online.
American poems:
“She Had some Horses” – Joy Harjo
“A Man Lost by a River” – Michael Blumenthal
“The Bones of My Father” – Etheridge Knight
“Wild Geese” – Mary Oliver
“A certain day . . .” – Denise Levertov
“Wilderness” – Carl Sandburg
“The Irish Cliffs of Moher” – Wallace Stevens
from When I Walk Through That Door, I Am – Jimmy Santiago Baca
“I think I could turn and live with animals . . .” – Walt Whitman
“Dance Russe” – William Carlos Williams
International poems:
“The Man Watching” – Rainer Maria Rilke (tr by Robert Bly)
“A Land Not Mine” – Anna Akhmatova (tr by Jane Kenyon)
“The Second Coming” – William Butler Yeats
from “Have You Anything to Say in Your Defense?” – Cesar Vallejo (tr by James Wright)
“Sometimes” – Hermann Hesse
“Sitting quietly . . .” haiku by unnamed Zen poet quoted in Oriental Mythology by Joseph Campbell
“I ask for a moment’s indulgence . . .” – Rabindranath Tagore
“Clouds and mountains all tangled . . .” – Han-Shan
Cantonese woman’s poem – author unknown
“Magic Words” – after Nalungiaq
“Old Song” – traditional, West Africa Old Song
Do not seek too much fame,
but do not seek obscurity.
Be proud.
But do not remind the world of your deeds.
Excel when you must,
but do not excel the world.
Many heroes are not yet born.
Many have already died.
To be alive to hear this song is a victory.
Traditional, West Africa
Brett Nelson
The Enigma of Chaco Canyon – Chaco, Part One
Oh the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere Bob Dylan, “When I Paint My Masterpiece”
Traces of unknown people who came before us are scattered all throughout New Mexico. It seems that in northwest New Mexico, from about 900 CE to 1150 CE all things led to Chaco Canyon from as far as east central Arizona near Window Rock, west central New Mexico from around the Gallup area to Mt Taylor, and Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado. A network of roads radiated from Chaco to these areas, and an unexplained North Road to nowhere with parallel 30-foot-wide tracks stretched straight as a string for 35 miles regardless of terrain, with no structures along it, ending in a path down bad-lands cliffs to a spot where large numbers of clay pots were ceremonially broken. No one knows how the Chacoans engineered these roads, but they can still be seen from a plane. It’s believed now that “nowhere” was to the north where Pueblo tribes believe they came from, so the North Road points back symbolically and spiritually to their origins.
The people of Chaco were brilliant astronomers, the only culture ever known to have oriented their buildings to the 18 ½ year cycle of the moon as well as the annual cycle of the sun. A fascinating 2003 PBS documentary titled The Mystery of Chaco Canyon, directed by researcher Anna Sofaer and narrated by Robert Redford, documents the researchers’ discoveries and the achievements of the Chacoans in detail. It includes interviews with Native Americans from several tribes relating their oral history and thoughts about Chaco, as well as interviews with scientists from many disciplines that worked on the site. The results and conclusions from research over the past 25 years by Anna Sofaer’s 45-year Solstice Project will be aired in 2024 by New Mexico PBS in a new documentary titled Written on the Landscape. A preview of new findings and recent thinking about Chaco can be found on the Solstice Project website (solsticeproject.org).
Chaco Canyon was abandoned in the 13th century, as were many of the other large pueblos of the Four Corners area. A severe 50-year drought beginning in 1130 CE is the most common reason proposed for the migration away from the canyon, although other theories have been proposed, including the arrival of Ute and Shoshone people into the Four Corners. But there is little evidence of violent conflict and no evidence of defensive structures in or near the canyon. The people of Chaco left without haste, deliberately sealing up doorways with masonry, and dismantling and burning the timbered roofs of the kivas, their most sacred spaces. At one time the mesas above Chaco Canyon were covered in pinon and ponderosa forest, and one book I have suggests that deforestation for firewood and timbers for Chaco building roofs resulted in a dropping of the water table so that Chaco Wash dried up. This may have been a factor in Chaco’s abandonment if the area could no longer support the vegetation and wildlife that could feed the population, which is clearly the case today.
There are other ruins all over New Mexico as well, especially in Bandelier National Monument, at Salmon Ruins and Aztec Ruins near Farmington, and at the Gila Cliff Dwellings. An archaeology PhD candidate I knew years ago told me about hundreds of small ruins he was finding on a ranch in western New Mexico near Quemado, mostly small piles of stones indicating small dwellings. A book titled Exploring the Jemez Country, by Roland H. Pettitt and Dorothy Hoard, gives a fascinating account of a major ruin called Amoxiumqua on a ridge high above the Jemez River Valley. The book describes Amoxiumqua as being H-shaped, “350 yards long” with 200-yard-long wings at each end that were “10 to 15 rooms wide and two to three stories high”, with seven kivas up to 35 feet across and a 150-foot diameter water tank lined with clay. That would compare with Pueblo Bonito or Chetro Ketl in Chaco Canyon, even Mesa Verde’s Cliff Palace. They write that in 1911 there was some archaeological work done there by the Royal Ontario Museum of Canada. Archaeologists estimated it was occupied about 1300-1500 CE, which means it was built after Chaco Canyon and other Four Corners sites were abandoned. So it was likely settled by Ancestral Puebloans who fled the drought-stricken Colorado Plateau. As far as I know, nothing has been done at the site since. I tried to reach it from directions in the book on a rough 4WD road until the ruts at one point looked too deep even for my high clearance 2WD pickup.
Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico was the largest structure in America until the late 1800s, as large as the Roman Colosseum – at least four stories high and large enough to hold 700-800 people. But many of the “rooms” were simply walled-in spaces or had no ventilation where a person would die of carbon monoxide poisoning or smoke inhalation if they built a fire. Clearly neither were meant to be lived in. Archaeologists now believe that Chaco Canyon did not house a large permanent population but instead was probably a central host site for ceremonial gatherings at certain times of the year, an American Mecca constructed to generate awe and reverence in the people who made the journey. Thousands of people likely came there at the equinoxes and solstices from dozens of communities, mostly in northwestern New Mexico but also from up to 200 miles away, including from Mesa Verde, returning after the ceremonies to their year-round homes. Archaeologist Brian Fagan has said that “Pueblo Bonito is an archaeological icon, as famous as Stonehenge, Mexico’s Teotihuacan, or Peru’s Machu Picchu.” That it was a major trade center is shown by macaw feathers, turquoise, seashells, and chocolate found at the site, including items from 2000 miles to the south.
The Chacoans’ sophisticated astronomical knowledge allowed them to construct Pueblo Bonito so the primary front wall was exactly aligned on an east-west axis with the sun’s rising and setting at the seasonal equinoxes, and with a perpendicular wall running north-south in the center of the complex so that its shadow disappears at the exact midpoint of the day. They carved a spiral on a rock wall on Fajada Butte so the sun at noon shining between slabs of rock illuminates the markings at the center and at the edges on the solstices and equinoxes – and at the same time marks the journey of the moon with its roughly 18 ½ year cycle from its northern most arc to its southern most arc and back at the center and the edge of the spiral, which appropriately has 9 ¼ turns. Petroglyphs all over the canyon are also marked by shafts of light or shadows at these times of the year. The Chaco people's astronomical knowledge may have been the most advanced in the world at the time, all without written records.
There are 13 ruins in Chaco Canyon and on the mesas above up to fifteen miles away that are all built with orientations to the sun and moon cycles, and with very complex orientations to Pueblo Bonito and to each other, even though many are not visible from Pueblo Bonito itself. For example, an imaginary line between two “great houses” on the mesas above opposite sides of the canyon is perpendicular to, and bisects the midpoint of, a line between Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl in the canyon bottom. And if you follow the line from one building in the canyon toward the rising or setting sun it leads straight to another building. Many other relationships are detailed in The Mystery of Chaco Canyon. The complex arrangement of all these buildings was an extraordinary engineering feat.
It's a fascinating place and a fascinating story of a sophisticated civilization on a par with civilizations of the Inca and other South American sites, the later Mesa Verde complex, the Moundbuilders complex at Cahokia, IL near St Louis, and Stonehenge. Aside from their astronomical knowledge, the precision of their building techniques with millions of small flat stones all done without metal tools or beasts of burden is a remarkable engineering achievement, along with their road system. They left a barrel of mysteries for us, some of which we have answered and many more we haven’t. The Solstice Project will likely be busy for a long time.
The Solstice Project is a team of archaeologists, astronomers, physicists, anthropologists, architects, and Deputy Director of the
US National Geodetic Survey Phillip Tuwaletstiwa, a member of the Hopi Tribe. Established in 1978 by Director Anna Sofaer, it has done research, preservation, and education related to the ruins and rock art of Chaco Canyon for the last 45 years in consultation with archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians from Pueblo tribes like Laguna, Zuni, Acoma, Ohkay Owingeh, and Santa Clara. Sofaer has produced and directed two previous films documenting their discoveries, The Sun Dagger (1982) and The Mystery of Chaco Canyon (1999), both narrated largely by Robert Redford, giving them some celebrity attraction that no doubt helped enhance their PBS viewership.
Discoveries since those two films have suggested a political domination by powerful people at Chaco of a hierarchical civilization spread over an area of the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah of 75,000-95,000 square miles, larger than Ohio or Ireland. The nature and spread of that influence is the subject of the Solstice Project’s third film titled Written on the Landscape – Mysteries Beyond Chaco Canyon, aired on New Mexico PBS in 2024, also narrated partially by Redford and enlarging on the fascinating story of Chaco told in The Mystery of Chaco Canyon.
One theory of Chaco’s demise now being entertained is that a major change occurred after 250 years of domination by those in power at Chaco, when those who were dominated and controlled, perhaps even being used as forced labor for the structures at Chaco and great houses all over the area of influence, began moving away to eventually settle in places like the Jemez and Zuni Mountains of New Mexico, the Rio Grande Valley and the mesas of the Hopi reservation. As anthropologist and McArthur Fellow Alfonso Ortiz of the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo proposed, they may have chosen to “consciously devolve” – that they “stopped and turned around,”* away from a hierarchical culture seeking power and building monumental structures with perhaps forced labor to different cultures. He likens those at the top of the heap to today’s one-percenters.
Some Pueblo tribes today have oral history of powerful people who created such a hierarchical society at Chaco at the expense of those they dominated, in which they prospered and collected considerable wealth. A burial pit at Chaco was found with two very tall and well-fed men surrounded by 15,000 pieces of turquoise, while most other human remains were short-statured, indicating they were not as well-fed. It’s now speculated that those who were dominated may have eventually moved away and formed non-hierarchical cultures characteristic of Hopis and Pueblo tribes today. And they tried to harmonize themselves with nature instead of control it as the Chacoans may have been trying to do. If so, it gives an intriguing model of reordering a hierarchical society without violent rebellion and defeating a dominant power by simply walking out the door, so to speak, and going elsewhere.
It will be interesting to follow the evidence coming out of Chaco research and see the conclusions that come from the Solstice Project research that Sofaer has pursued for forty-five years. I can’t help thinking of the more naïve and unsuccessful attempt to change American society by nonviolent means in the sixties in what came to be known as the counterculture movement. There
was an attempt by some serious people within that social trend to develop an alternative culture based on love and equal respect
for all people, conservation and ecological responsibility, growing and eating natural organic food without the use of pesticides, abandoning nuclear energy, consensus decision-making instead of hierarchical order, and abnegation of war as foreign policy.
Most of the communal settlements didn’t last long and the movement didn’t galvanize a significant segment of the population, so it fizzled out in the seventies. The development of current hierarchical political states has gone so far beyond what may have existed at Chaco Canyon and the Moundbuilder societies in eastern North America below the Great Lakes such as Cahokia that it may be impossible to make the turnaround that may have happened in the Chaco sphere of influence, but mass historical and cultural movements are unpredictable. The internet provided us almost limitless information resources and helped spawn a mushrooming of self-owned businesses. It facilitated the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, forcibly suppressed in many Arab countries but resulting in civil wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen and periodic demonstrations against governments ever since, even in Iran. Millions of people have just walked away from being employees of corporations, accelerating since the Covid pandemic. But what if an oligarchical power structure and government in the US takes control of the internet the way the Chinese government has? History, however, is famously unpredictable. Who would have predicted Donald Trump – anything about Donald Trump, or Barack Obama for that matter.
The course of economic development in the industrialized world makes it seem doubtful that most developed nations, particularly the US, China, and Russia (Russia may be imploding and China’s economy is showing signs of trouble), are capable of responding to the danger of unchecked pollution and out-of-control climate change. Without some dramatic political and economic readjustment from the industrialized world, that lack of adequate response will likely lead to its own eventual destruction in armed conflict or environmental disaster. Neither giant corporations nor the voting populations of the developed countries seem to have the will to make the necessary changes. And people in this country can no longer pack up and go west. It will be up to the common people of these countries to find a way, since the corporate world can only see the dollar sign, and politicians who feed at the trough of Citizens United seem unable to make more than token efforts. But Written on the Landscape gives us in a very general way a model for what is possible. What might we be able to walk away from? It will be interesting to see what their research for the last 20 years has revealed, and to see what their speculations about the research’s implications for the current political and ecological situation are.
Further remarkable facts and assessments of Chaco:
“No other ancient astronomers are known to have constructed such a complex timepiece of shadow and light.” The Mystery of Chaco Canyon
Pueblo Bonito at noon on the equinoxes marks the middle of the day and the middle of the year when night and day are of equal length. It’s the “Middle of Time”.
Though thousands of people likely came to Chaco Canyon at the equinoxes, there were only 300 burials in 250 years, so very few people seem to have lived there.
220,000 large timbers were needed to construct the roofs and other parts of the ten buildings in the canyon.
Phillip Tuwaletstiwa of the National Geodetic Survey points out that the Chacoans “were scientists”. They would have had to carefully observe and somehow record the movement of the moon for generations to be able to mark the maximum and minimum extremes with the sun dagger spiral to orient seven of the buildings in the canyon to the moon’s maximum extreme – the northernmost rising and setting in its 18 ½ year cycle.
The direction of the 35-mile North Road, invisible from Pueblo Bonito in the canyon bottom, bisects and is perpendicular to the line between Pueblo Bonito and Chetro Ketl, the two largest great houses in the canyon.
The North Road, leading to no structures or resources, is directional only. It leads to the north, the place where Hopi and Pueblo people believe they originated and came from, which is true in the sense that population of North America was apparently accomplished by crossing the Bering Straight and coming down a corridor between the glacial ice sheets and/or migrating by boat down along the west coast. “It connects us back to our creator” -- Acoma anthropologist Connie Garcia
200,000 pieces of turquoise have been found in the canyon, plus sea shells, parrot and macaw skeletons, and chocolate likely used for ceremonial purposes, indicating trade from cultures 2000-3000 miles to the south in Mexico and Central America.
200 miles of well-constructed roads connect great houses all over the 95,000 sq mi of Chaco influence.
* “Inscrutable Chaco”, Santa Fe Magazine, May, 2023.
Brett Nelson
Mother Trees: The Forest Is Intelligent, and It "Cares"!
The forest is not a collection of entities [but] a place entirely made from strands of relationship. Biologist David George
Altruism remains a puzzle, but an even deeper scientific quandary is posed by the pervasive existence of cooperative behavior, all through nature . . . it is there, and it has been ever since the beginnings of life. The biosphere, for all its wild complexity, seems to rely more on symbiotic relationships than we used to believe, and there is a generally amiable aspect to nature that needs more acknowledgement than we have tended to give it in the past.
Physician and essayist Lewis Thomas, The Fragile Species
A forest has always been for me a community that emanated a presence of some sort which invited my exploration into their realm. Whether it was “Spooky Forest” – a few wooded lots in the middle of town a few blocks from our house, or a few acres of woods on the south side of Lake Story with a Scout cabin across from the public beach, or the vast expanse of the 224,000-acre Pecos Wilderness in New Mexico, any time I ventured into a forest I would feel a heightened sense of expectation and mystery, and a sense of coming home to something I’ve been acquainted with in my spiritual bones for ages. I feel more alive when I enter a forest. But I always considered them to be essentially a collection of individual trees with other kinds of vegetation at their feet.
As a result of the vision and research of Suzanne Simard and other biologists over the past 40-50 years, it’s now known that a forest is something much more complex and sophisticated, unknown and unguessed by most of those who have managed forests for the last hundred years or more. What appear to be separate, individual trees are only the above ground manifestations of
a network, an interdependent community of biological species working together like a brain. The unseen and unguessed but critically essential members of the network are thousands of species of fungus connecting the roots of all the trees in a forest together and to other species of plants and nearby forests as well, facilitating the transfer of nutrients back and forth according to need, just as our brains “think” by transmitting electro-chemical messages back and forth over neurons. So forests "think," in a sense not so unlike us.
I never took a biology course in high school or college even though I’ve always loved being in the presence of “nature,” away
from the concrete and blacktop and steel and brick of the city. But in the past couple years I’ve read a few fascinating books on biological subjects which have changed my attitude toward the biological sciences, most recently Finding the Mother Tree – Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, a 2021 bestseller relating her discoveries over five decades of forestry research with the Canadian version of our Forest Service in British Columbia. She grew up there in a rugged family making a living in their own mom-and-pop logging operation with another family member or two at times. It was a rough and dangerous life, but she was immersed in it until corporate clear-cutting made their business untenable. She later worked for the forest service in British Columbia, with an alternative point of view from her colleagues -- fighting for grant money to pursue her out-of-the-box field experiments to ultimately demonstrate how her approach was much better than the typical one-crop, single-species planting and clear-cutting practices of the 60s, until her research changed the Canadian forest industry. The book is written as a personal memoir and reads like an enjoyable page-turner novel, but in the process it lays out decades of pains-takingly-planned and executed research experiments that in the end vindicated her vision.
What she ultimately discovered is that there is a network of mycorrhizal (new word to me!) fungi that connects the roots of trees and other plants with each other to provide channels for moving nutrients back and forth between trees -- carrying water, amino acids, nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon to the trees that need them most, and providing sugars for the fungi in exchange. Wikipedia states that there are roughly 10,000 species of mycorrhizal fungi. They constitute an information-sharing system much like the World Wide Web in our digital age, sometimes referred to as the Wood Wide Web. The engine of this system is the presence of mother trees, the oldest and largest trees that guide the process, even to the extent of transmitting their wisdom to younger trees who can take their places when the mother trees die. When that happens they then releases all their unbound carbon to the system through the fungal network to be distributed to other trees.
The conventional wisdom was that trees of different species competed with each other, so clear-cutting was employed partly to eliminate the competition. But Simard’s research showed that different species were often symbiotic and had a complementary relationship in which both benefitted. Her first breakthrough initially demonstrated that Douglas fir trees, contrary to forest service beliefs, in the long run grew faster and were more disease-resistant if paper birches that normally grew around them were grown in the same plots with them, even though seedlings grew slower at first because they got less sun.
So a forest is an intelligence. It has direction, purpose, and responsiveness to the needs of its constituent members. It knows what it’s doing. And it operates like it cares about its fellow members of the forest, especially the progeny from its own seeds, hence the label mother tree. It’s like the forest is a family, with parent trees caring for their offspring – children sprung from their own seeds, grandchildren from their seeds, and perhaps great grandchildren. They even share nutrients to some extent with other species. The forest seems to care for its fellows, and cares for itself as a result. It behaves as if it "cares." In our species we call this love. I’m not equating this with the human brain and heart, but the result is much the same as an extended family. But who knows what trees "feel" and "think" -- they even use glutamate, the most common neurotransmitter in our brains. The word ecology is defined in Webster’s as “the complex of relations between a specific organism and its environment.” I’ve also heard it used to mean, and have come to think of it as, the complex of relationships between the all the elements of a particular environment, biological, geological, and meteorological. It’s a system concept, and modern science is more and more taking a systems approach to studying phenomena. A forest in this sense is an ecological entity, as is the Amazon rainforest or the high desert of New Mexico or the huge forested bowl of the Pecos River headwaters in the Pecos Wilderness. By extension, the planet Earth is an ecological entity, and even our galaxy and the universe as well, in the sense that an event in one part of the system can through ripple effects have an affect on any other part of the system.
We have to think in ecological terms with a systems mentality if we want to understand and manage the natural environment
to be healthy and sustainable. Indigenous peoples around the world have been telling us this for decades. It's a cornerstone of indigenous spirituality, perhaps the cornerstone of indigenous spirituality in my limited understanding, that everything is related
to everything else in a complex web of relations, seeing all plants and animals as brothers and sisters – all my relations – in a balance that has to be maintained in harmony for the world to continue. Modern western science is now coming around to a similar point of view.
The old western point of view of man being given dominion over the plants and animals, with "man" (masculine) being at the center of creation, as the Earth was thought to be the center of the solar system, has led us to the environmental mess we're in. We’ve seen some of the effects of human “improvement” upsetting the balance with invasive species like rabbits in Australia, salt cedar in the Rio Grande bosque, kudzu in the American Southeast, and the explosion of deer and coyote populations along with disease as a result of the elimination of apex predators. Everything is connected and can ultimately affect everything else. So I wonder if this concept of ecology has potential for the core of a new kind of spiritual consciousness (which is actually ancient) that we desperately need. If the awareness of this idea could spread throughout humanity, it could change the world. Ideas sometimes do change the world like this when the time is ripe for their acceptance, like the concepts of evolution and microbial spread of disease. A couple of Ken Burns documentaries and frequent short spots on the nightly news could begin to implant the idea in the consciousness of masses of people. It’s a seductive and hopeful prospect.
Lisbeth Salander, for my money, is the most fascinating fictional character I’ve run across in over fifty years of reading Steinbeck, Faulkner, Joyce, Raymond Chandler, E M Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, Barbara Kingsolver, Dostoevsky, Tony Hillerman, Twain, Austen, John Le Carre and Lawrence, among others. Stieg Larsson weaves an intricate, multilayered story around her in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, novels that explore some of the darkest elements of Swedish society, which have their counterparts in every developed country in the world: violence toward women and sex trafficking of vulnerable women, the neo-fascist and racist undercurrents of civilized society, and political and corporate corruption and abuse of power, as well as the dark underside of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. His long history as an investigative journalist running the expose publication Expo gave him the background knowledge that shows up in thoroughly detailed depiction of these aspects of Larsson's home country in his novels. The reader gets the feeling that the corruption and violence he shows in his books are the fictionalized truth of realities that exist in Sweden and by implication in every developed Western nation to one degree or another.
Larsson was a prominent investigative journalist whose crusade against extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi groups in Sweden brought death threats that made he and his partner Eva Gabrielsson choose not to marry because in Sweden that would have required public registration of their address. They had been granted identity cover for their addresses and phone numbers due to those threats. The non-profit Expo’s stated original mission was “to study and survey anti-democratic, right-wing extremist and racist tendencies in Swedish society . . . The foundation’s policy is to safeguard democracy and freedom of expression against racist, right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic, and totalitarian tendencies in society.” His first book, 1991’s The Far Right, co-authored with Anna-Lena Lodenius, was a 370-page documentation of right-wing extremism from WWI to 1991 in Sweden and elsewhere, including the US.
The Millenium Trilogy novels unfold layer upon layer of story as complex as life itself. The dialogue has subtle wit and humor and sounds like real people talking. The characters are nuanced and fully drawn, with real and specific virtues and flaws that give us occasion to think more deeply about ourselves. Like the novels of Tana French, they make a case for Raymond Chandler’s assertion that the “mystery” genre is a form as capable of producing good literature as the Victorian novel of manners or any other form. But Larsson has a wider scope than French and Chandler. Salander, Blomkvist and the rest of the cast of Aransky, Berger, Henrik and Martin Vanger, Zalachenko and Niederman, Bjurman and Teleborian, Gullberg and Clinton, Bublanski and Modig and the web of interactions between them are a vehicle for holding up a mirror to Swedish society and the human condition. At the same time, they explore the sticky difficulties of love and friendship, their heartbreaks, compromises and partial satisfactions, played out primarily between Salander and Blomkvist, and Berger and Blomkvist. Ultimately the novels are about the uses and abuses of power and the nature of honesty and deception on both an interpersonal level and a societal level.
There is considerable violence in all three books, but it’s not a steady diet as in books like The Bourne Identity and not the primary engine of the books’ development and denouement. In fact the violent scenes in the books, though often graphic, take up few pages in the books. It’s violence as violence rather than as vicarious thrill in the churn-em-out bestsellers of popular suspense writers. The violence in the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is particularly gruesome in the graphic and brutal rape of Salander by the sadistic legal guardian Bjurman who wields power over her life in a horrific way, and in the psychopathic and grotesquely sadistic serial murders that the journalist Mikael Blomkvist and Salander discover in the first book. The account of Bjurman’s assault is disturbing to read, but it becomes an occasion for Salander to exact a brutal but poetic revenge that reverses the power dynamic and gives her control of her finances and her life, and of Bjurman as well. It also reveals her own capacity for violence to “those who deserve it.” As readers we root for her and take satisfaction in the appropriateness of her calculated revenge, while at the same time we're uncertain about her violent potential and vigilante stance as judge and jury and enforcer
of justice, much as we react to the private eye who breaks the law to punish the bad guy. How far will she go? Is she capable of murder? Where does she draw the line? And how would we act?
The Godfather movies were criticized by some as too graphically violent, but they were praised by others for showing the truth about violence rather than the sanitized version of 50s and 60s TV westerns and cop shows. Larsson does much the same for the sadistic violence to women as Coppola did for mafia violence. Larsson's agenda to highlight the truth about the issue is revealed
in the quotes of statistics of violence to women at the beginning of each major section of the book. The book’s title in Swedish translates as Men Who Hate Women, and Larsson stood his ground against efforts to change it. The horrific details of the serial murders Blomkvist and Salander discover are disturbing evidence for the title, but America has a documented counterpart that testifies to the reality in the story of David Parker Ray, the “Toy Box Killer” in New Mexico in the 1990s.
The first book in the trilogy is focused on the physical violence toward Salander and other women and the power men have in practice to violate legal rights of women that all men and women are supposed to have but are so often ignored for women. It also explores the ability of authorities to use the media and the legal system to paint a highly distorted picture of Salander and to cover up mens’ violence to women and abrogation of human rights. But Blomkvist, and Salander as well, wrestle with the conflict about her outlaw mentality and desire for retaliation, which is paired with a strict adherence to her own set of values that most of us find sympathy with, if the popularity of Larsson’s books is an indication.
The books are not without flaws. Salander’s hacker skills and her genius-savant level of mathematical intelligence stretch the imagination a bit and give her a touch of superhero aura, and yet there are people with such abilities, and what she does along with her Hacker Republic friends is fascinating. I suspect Larsson must have had some acquaintance with a hacker to have written these books. Kurdo Baksi in his memoir of Larsson says that Expo magazine had an employee who had a similar personality and skills, although he doesn’t label him a hacker. The details of Salander’s hacking activities make it believable that Larsson knew what he was writing about.
Like many a mystery-novel private eye, the investigative journalist Blomkvist beds multiple women (although that was never true with Chandler and Hammett, the original masters of crime fiction), three in the first book, which is at least one too many. But he’s not aggressive or predatory, and his polyamorous ways are occasion for exploration of the costs of his behavior and the issue of commitment in him and in Salander and Berger. To some extent, that and the graphicness of some of the violence may have been Larsson’s nod to book sales, or to the chance of getting published at all, having no fiction credits - whether he was motivated by money or by the desire to get his message out.
The rosy endings of the first and third books, Dragon Tattoo and Hornet’s Nest could be criticized as unrealistic, but inspiring “truth is stranger than fiction” stories make the news with regularity. And it’s a common characteristic of the genre, the movie Chinatown
and James M Cain novels being notable exceptions, and we all want to see the vindication of the characters we care about. The same could be said of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven or E M Forster’s Passage to India and A Room with a View, which are wonderful literature. Some of Larsson’s villains are unrelievedly evil, and the good guys pretty thoroughly good, but they all have dimension and individuality and nuance. Even the psychopaths Zalachenko and Niederman are convinc-ingly drawn personalities. They're all characters, not caricatures. There is a degree of unrealism in Salander’s multiplicity of skills, from computer and math savant to martial arts from a 4’11”, 88 pound frame to her mastery of disguise and burglary and of banking manipulation pyrotechnics. One of Larsson’s minor themes is the phenomenon of the brilliant savant with limited emotional and interpersonal development. Another is the world of computer hacking.
In spite of the minor flaws the Millenium Trilogy tells a richly layered tale of perseverance and hope in the possibility of justice and retribution that shines a light without polemic on some of the most disturbing issues of our time. They're novels that are rich in story and character, “the human heart in conflict with itself” that Faulkner said made good writing, and that capture and fascinate us and make us want to read the books in one sitting if we could forego sleep. But these books are not whodunnit mysteries or crime or suspense fiction. They are novels using those genres to address themes of depth about Swedish society as well as personal themes of love, sex and the nature of friendship, honesty and moral choice. The books hold up under repeated readings as the richness of the story becomes even more apparent and the characters never fail to fascinate. And they will keep you up long past your intended bedtime even more for “the human heart in conflict with itself” aspect when the suspense of what will happen next is gone.
We see how expertly Larsson weaves the rich complexities of his tale through three books that each have a different theme but work together seamlessly to tell a continuous story that reaches a its climax in both the dramatic vindication of Salander and the equally compelling climax of the arrest of the members of a secret shadow cabal within in the intelligence community running a shadow government operation unknown to anyone but themselves and one regular intelligence official who secretly channels
their funding without asking what they’re doing. If it sounds like the stuff of fantasy, Gabrielsson says the books are fictionalized versions of a side of Sweden that is generally well-hidden, especially the right wing extremist and Neo-Nazi elements of Swedish society that have lurked under the surface ever since Hitler: “everything of this nature described in the Millenium trilogy has happened at one time or another to a Swedish citizen, journalist, politician, public prosecutor, unionist or policeman. Nothing was made up.”
One wonders if Larsson wanted to make known to the public everything he knew from his life as a journalist but couldn’t prove without having to defend himself in multiple court cases, putting it instead in fictional form. The final book is to my mind the best of the three, though not by much, and it can only be appreciated fully after reading the first two, and they each tell different but interconnected stories. The books frequently jump back and forth between scenes and characters in the same chapter in a way that gives the sense of things happening simultaneously and heightens the drama and draws the reader into the story.
Larsson submitted all three books simultaneously for publication. According to partner Eva Gabielsson, he conceived a series
of ten books, with 200 pages of a fourth novel and possible synopses of two more. The first novel starts with Blomkvist being convicted of libel even though his assertions were accurate, and fiction is one way of “saying a lot without saying a lot” as poet Robert Bly once put it. Since he died of a heart attack shortly after publication, we’ll never know how well he might have been able to realize his vision. His family successfully disputed his un-notarized will and refused to let his partner Eva Gabrielsson manage his literary legacy even though she asked for no financial benefit, so she has refused to finish and release his partly-written fourth book and outlines for future books and notes. But what he did leave us with is a treasure with fascinating and convincingly-drawn characters, a lot of truth-telling, humor, and great storytelling.
Voyager did things no one predicted, found scenes no one expected, and promises to outlive its inventors. Like a great painting or an abiding institution, it has acquired an existence of its own, a destiny beyond the grasp of its handlers. Stephen J. Pyne
The title of this website comes from Carl Sagan pointing out the blue dot on the TV screen at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech as a large roomful of scientists were saying goodbye to Voyager I, one of the two small spacecraft they had watched so intently for thirteen years, from 1977 to 1990. It had passed the last planet, Neptune, completing its primary mission, and would have nothing farther out to photograph, so the camera was being turned off to conserve power as it headed for interstellar space. The camera that had given them so many astonishing and unexpected images was always pointed into space at what it was flying toward, but before they shut it down, after Sagan twisted NASA’s arm for the OK they pointed the camera back toward the solar system to take pictures of six planets that could be seen. A grainy photo on the TV screen showed a tiny blue dot in a reflected ray of the sun. It was Earth from 3.7 billion miles away, and Sagan said to those present
“the Earth in a sunbeam . . . less than a pixel, and this is where we live, on a blue dot. On that blue dot, that’s
where everyone you know . . . and everyone human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. I think this
perspective underscores our responsibility to preserve and cherish that blue dot, the only home we have.”
“The only home we have.” It’s such a simple phrase, but it felt like a laser. Later Sagan wrote a book titled Pale Blue Dot.
The photograph on my website home page of the Rio Grande in late afternoon to me symbolizes the beauty and fragile nature of our small blue dot, contrasted with the tiny less-than-a-pixel blue dot that Earth is in the Voyager I photo, dramatizing what a tiny corner of the universe Earth is in spite of being so large to us that we can’t see its curve on the horizon.
l didn’t know anything about the Voyager Program until I watched the 2017 PBS documentary about it titled The Last Voyager in Space, when it was first shown and was so moved by it I got the DVD and have watched it many times, twice with two different groups of friends. It never gets old, the story of what these two amazing little machines the size of a school bus did and found, and of the emotional experiences of the scientists in the huge control room who were interviewed for and collectively narrate the film. Scientists are often stereotyped as detached and intellectual and emotionally unexpressive, but the twenty or so interviewed for this documentary weren’t. They were just like you and me, baby! The worries, anxieties, elations, disappointments, sadness, awe, wonder, and even love they voiced made the film so relatable and were as big a part of the film’s story as the mission itself.
One early segment documented that building Voyager included buying loads of aluminum foil that was the only thing they could think of to shield the instruments of this extremely sophisticated piece of machinery from intense magnetic fields and radiation. So it was built with rare metals, super cameras, incredibly advanced electronics for the time, and rolls of aluminum foil bought at WalMart, perhaps creating a temporary local shortage of it, as one scientist speculated. Part of the advanced electronics was a computer that was made when the largest computer in the world was as powerful as “something you carry in your pocket . . . and I’m not talking about a cell phone, I’m talking about your key fob,” one scientist observed.
One of the fascinating things about Voyager was the Golden Record, which included a variety of music from many cultures, greetings from President Carter and fifty-five people all over the world in their own languages, a wide variety of nature and animal sounds, photographs, and information about where Earth stood in relation to known pulsars in the universe. Sagan, besides making important technical contributions to the project, was charged with creating the record in eight months with a very limited budget. It became the thing that captured the public interest more than anything about the Voyager mission. It’s extremely unlikely any extraterrestrial being, if there are such, will ever find Voyager and the record, but it’s our note in a bottle cast on the ocean of space and a tantalizing prospect.
NASA persuaded Richard Nixon to OK the Voyager project by pointing out that the outer planets lined up to be able to use gravity assist to speed up the spacecraft to make the journey in about twelve years instead of the thirty plus it would take otherwise, explaining that the last time the planets had lined up like this Thomas Jefferson was president, and it would be another 175 years before it would happen again.
Unanticipated problems plagued Voyager from the beginning, threatening to destroy the mission they’d worked so long and hard to prepare. As soon as they launched the first Voyager, the computer on board went haywire from the intense vibration of a rocket bigger than any that had previously launched a spacecraft, but it was quickly reprogrammed to tolerate more vibration, which saved it from immediate disaster. With the second launch there was a leak in a fuel line and the second stage of the rocket only made it to the required velocity to get to Jupiter with 3.5 seconds of fuel left.
The encounter with Jupiter and its moons astonished the scientists who expected moons that were dead worlds like Earth’s moon, but Jupiter’s moons were unexpected and different from each other. Callisto was completely covered with impact craters, but Europa had none. Instead, Europa had the smoothest surface of all the moons the Voyager craft surveyed, and it was found to have a water-ice crust and a thin oxygen atmosphere, with a possible water ocean beneath its crust that could potentially support life. They were shocked to find that Io was riddled with active volcanoes spewing plumes 200 miles into space. And they discovered Jupiter has rings like Saturn, never guessed before. Then it sped off on its year-long flight toward Saturn at ten miles per second.
Saturn was the most astonishing planet, with dramatic rings that looked like grooves on a phonograph record. Its moon Titan had a methane atmosphere with lakes of liquid methane. Other Saturn moons may have oceans of liquid water beneath a frozen surface. Voyager II swung close to Saturn and behind it, and when it came back into view its camera was frozen. What happened was the gears, on the cold side of the planet blocked from the sun, locked up from not enough lubricant getting to the gears. Like a car frees itself from being stuck in mud or snow by rocking gently back and forth and getting a little farther each time until it gets out, Voyager II did the same with the camera gears until they got free and lubrication flowed into the gears.
Voyager I headed out for interstellar space after Saturn while Voyager II headed out on the five-year journey to Uranus. After
discovering Uranus was a rather bland pale blue ball with two rings and ten tiny moons, Voyager II discovered 50,000-foot ice cliffs and “deep gashes” in the surface of its moon Miranda – “It looked like a jumbled-up mess” – a 300-mile-diameter moon that was one of the smallest studied. One scientist said many thought the moons studied would be like “Once you’ve seen one moon, you’ve seen them all,” but “one of the great surprises of Voyager” was that “there was no uninteresting moon. They were all interesting . . .” One of Uranus’ moons was the strangest yet with a surface mangled and scarred like no other moon. Uranus also had rings, but light from the sun was so faint that its rings were twice as dark as soot, so the camera had to be reprogrammed to rotate with what it photographed while the shutter was left open.
After the three-and-a-half year journey to Neptune, thirty times as far from Earth as the distance from the Earth to the sun, it turned out to be a deep blue ball with a large dark spot similar to the huge red storm spot on Jupiter. Its mountainous moon Triton turned out to have geysers spewing out plumes of some liquid. Nothing recognizable could be seen at first and it was feared they had nothing until one of the imaging team scientists combined orange and blue filters, and the geysers exploded on the screen in clear images.
When Voyager II was well past Neptune and had nothing left to photograph, they planned to shut down the camera to conserve energy, but due to Carl Sagan’s persuasiveness with NASA they turned the camera back toward the solar system before they did that and photographed the outer planets – later labeled the “Family Portrait,” thus getting the photo of Earth as a blue dot in a sunbeam that triggered Sagan's famous "blue dot" comment. In 2012 Voyager I passed the limits of the solar wind and the sun’s gravitational orbit, the heliopause, leaving the solar system – the first man-made object to reach interstellar space. It will pass the nearest other stars in 40,000 years. The Golden Record will last two billion years.
All of these discoveries were amazing, but the scientists’ descriptions of their emotional reactions to the dramatic flybys of the planets and the drama of problems that repeatedly threatened the mission were as compelling as the astounding discoveries.
So many things went wrong that could have destroyed the data or one of the spacecraft, sending people on a rollercoaster of emotions, but ultimately everything went right on the most ambitious space project ever attempted.
Some twenty people throughout the film shared reactions of excitement, wonder, anxiety, disappointment, frustration, laughter, awe, and yes, love. There were laughs of relief with the release of tension from just talking about near disasters, the laughter of astonished disbelief, euphoria, and tears when talking about Voyagers I and II going past the planets to head out of the solar system as the mission was completed. One scientist talked about the Voyagers leaving the solar system like losing a child, and
it was a man who said that. It’s a remarkable story with all the drama, suspense, disappointment, elation, relief, humor, and satisfaction of an award-winning movie. In spite of the scope and the length in years of the project and everything that threatened to scuttle it, the Voyager mission remarkably accomplished everything it set out to do.
I have an album in my music collection, now on CD, that has always felt like a classic, which for me means great songs with no weak numbers, great musicianship, and masterful, heartfelt vocals that carry me into an altered emotional space. I think it’s the most completely realized music album I’ve ever heard, not just flawless but passionately and delicately sung, with sensitive and restrained but beautiful musical accompaniment that provides a strong foundation for the songs, provided by a group of musicians who were among the best of that time, at the top of their game. They include guitarists Stephen Stills and James Burton (with credits as long as your arm and a leg thrown in), Chris Etheridge of the Flying Burrito Brothers on bass, the ubiquitous Jim Gordon on drums, and Buddy Emmons on pedal steel guitar. The album is 1968’s Who Knows Where the Time Goes by Judy Collins.
Introduced to it by a friend who was a rabid Collins fan, I bought it in the early 70s. It grew on me quickly, and it’s stood the test of time such that it’s better than ever more than 50 years later. If I had to pick one album as the best album I own, with a lot of stiff competition in a large collection, even though it’s impossible to pick just one, this would probably be it. The album appropriately begins with “Hello, Hooray” by a Canadian singer-songwriter named Rolf Kempf about the eager anticipation of musicians minutes before the start of a concert. I can imagine Collins opening a concert with this song welcoming the audience and saying “I like to open with this song because it’s about the drama unfolding right now, which is that we are here only because you are here, and you are participants in this drama just as we are, so I thank you from the bottom of my heart for coming to hear us play for you.”
She then launches into the song that took me a while to get used to because of its unusual rhythmic structure, but it grew on me with time until I loved listening to it. It starts with
Hello, Hooray, let the show begin/I’m ready . . .
All of the audience is coming here to stay
Each one an actor, each one play . . .
We’ve been waiting so long for another song
I thought I was the only one . . .
So I will sit, and I’ll act so prim
And we will laugh when this thing begins.
It’s a celebration of the excited anticipation of musicians and audience at the beginning of a concert, and her voice soars through a complex melody as she welcomes, invites, and includes the audience in the drama. The euphoric tension is palpable as she sings.
It's followed by the agonizing moral conundrum of Leonard Cohen’s “Story of Isaac” posing the question faced by Abraham, according to biblical tradition, of what does a holy religious leader of his people do when his God commands him to sacrifice his son? It’s narrated in the first verse by the nine-year-old Isaac:
He stood so tall above me
And his blue eyes they were shining
And his voice was very cold
He said “I’ve had a vision
And you know I’m strong and holy
I must do what I’ve been told”
So we started up the mountain
I was running, he was walking
And his axe was made of gold.
Collins sings its foreboding melody with a sobering voice. We know that the story says God stayed Abraham’s hand, but we feel the weight of what authorities command that can clash head-on with one’s deepest values. So the next verse shifts without saying it outright to the 1960s and the Vietnam War as she sings in firm and somber voice
You who build these altars now
To sacrifice these children
You must not do it anymore
For you’ve never had a vision
And you never have been tempted
By the devil or the Lord . . .
Back to Isaac
When I lay upon the mountain
And my father’s hand was trembling
With the beauty of the word.
Then to Abraham
For when all has come to dust
I will kill you if I must
I will love you if I can
But may I never learn to scorn
The body out of chaos born
The woman and the man
It’s an enigmatic and ambiguous song, hard to find the moral center in. As with many of Cohen’s songs, it’s full of the complexity of human existence. Whether you are Jewish or Christian, believer or agnostic or atheist, it makes the listener struggle with how to understand the attitude the song takes toward Abraham, as the biblical story does. I imagine there have been reams written about it in Jewish religious commentary. Abraham’s eyes are “shining” as he talks to his son – with tears apparently. He can’t say no to his God, but he’s a reluctantly obedient servant. In the end Abraham says to himself “I will kill you if I must/I will love you if I can”, so his ability to love is uncertain, but he wants to love Isaac “if I can” and prays that he never learns to scorn the body of the child born of the marital union. His moral conflict and struggle to love is contrasted with the men who build altars to power and sacrifice young American men in a military chess game but have no moral-spiritual grounds for what they do, as Cohen sees it. It’s a powerful song sung powerfully by Collins. Throughout the album she exhibits not just her beautiful voice but an emotional depth as well in the inflection and cadence of her singing, bolstered here by only organ and harpsichord played by Michael Sahl, one of two songs Collins doesn’t play acoustic guitar on.
"Story of Isaac" is followed by the gorgeous “My Father,” written by Collins but not about her father.
My father always promised us
That we would live in France
We’d go boating on the Seine
And I would learn to dance , . .
On his dream like boats
We knew we’d sail in time
Her sisters marry “their grownup dreams/Lilacs and the man” while she “only danced alone”, and “The colors of my father’s dreams/Faded without a sound” but
I live in Paris now
My children dance and dream
Hearing the words of a miner’s life
In words they’ve never seen
She’s lived out his dream, but Collins’ voice has a sweet sadness that he didn’t live it, and she watches the Paris sun set as she dreams it would have in his eyes. That the narrator is a character in the song and not Collins is indicated by the fact that her father was a radio personality in Denver, while the woman in the song lives in Ohio where her father “worked in the mines”, and her children in Paris “dance and dream”, whereas Collins had only one son.
The song’s beautiful melody is accompanied by a gorgeous and delicate piano by Michael Melvoin that floats through the song like a butterfly and is the instrumental highlight of the song, and by gentle playing from Stills, Etheridge and Gordon. Collins doesn’t play acoustic guitar on this either, but she plays electric piano underneath the lead piano. “My Father” makes a strong bid for my favorite song on the album.
“Someday Soon” is a cowboy song by Ian Tyson of a woman in love with a man whose “age is twenty-one/Just out of the service/And he’s lookin for his fun” who ”loves his damned old rodeo/As much as he loves me”. Her parents
. . . cannot stand him cause he rides the rodeo
My father says that he will leave me cryin
I would follow him right down the toughest road I know
Someday soon, goin with him, someday soon
And when he comes to call my Pa ain’t got a good word to say
Guess it’s cause he was just as wild in the younger days
It’s a romantic song of a girl in love with a young man who may or may not be an irresponsible wildcat, loving him for his wildness. It has a wonderful laidback slapping beat from what sounds like a drumstick on a wood block, along with a brush. Burton plays a melodic guitar while Stills plays bass and Buddy Emmons plays a restrained pedal steel guitar. Collins sings it like she means it with a style that sounds like a Western ranch girl in love with a cowboy. I love the relaxed and easy but insistent rhythm in the song, similar to Eagles songs like “Peaceful Easy Feeling” and “Train Leaves Here This Morning,” and all the musicians are perfectly in sync with each other and with Collins.
The title song “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” vies with “My Father” and “Bird on the Wire” for best song on the album. It’s a cover of the Sandy Denny tune that may be even better than Denny’s wonderful version on her album Sandy, which is saying a lot. The singer notes the birds leaving in the winter sky and wonders “Ah, how can they know it’s time for them to go?”
Sad deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving
Ah, but then you know, it’s time for them to go
But I will still be here
I have no thought of leaving
I do not count the time
Who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?
And I’m not alone
While my love is near me
And I know it will be so, till it’s time to go
So come the storms of winter
And then the birds in spring again
I do not fear the time
Who knows how my love grows?
Who knows where the time goes?
It’s a wonderful melody in a song expressing an acceptance of change and loss without fear, at peace with the impermanence of seasons and relationships. When she sings “till it’s time to go” it’s not clear who is going to do the leaving when the time comes, but the attitude is that separations have their own timetable and happen when the time is right and should be accepted without fear. It’s a brave philosophy that has affinities with Pete Seeger’s take on Ecclesiastes in “Turn, Turn, Turn” – “To everything, there is a season”. Collins sings it, as she does all the songs on the album, with a full voice and wonderful sense of timing, even on songs like this and “Hello, Hooray” that don’t have the steady rhythm that “Someday Soon” has, creating a rendition that is smooth as silk so the free-form improvisational rhythm doesn’t feel unsettling. She seems to instinctively know when to hesitate or to hold a note to enhance the emotional effect on the listener, much as Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, and Lady Gaga do. She sounds totally in command on every song and with a full sense of the emotional quality of each line.
A big part of the Who Knows Where the Time Goes? album’s appeal is Collins’ song selection, by far the best of any of her albums I’ve listened to. The next cut is “I Pity the Poor Immigrant”, an enigmatic song from Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, released a year before Collins’ album. It’s always been unclear to me who Dylan had in mind – maybe someone like a Mafia Don? A ruthless corporate CEO? A corrupt politician? Perhaps deliberately vague - fill in the blanks. It's a powerful portrait of a psychopath who finds no satisfaction in the hollowness of the wealth and power he achieves.
That man whom with his fingers cheats
And who lies with every breath
Who passionately hates his life
And likewise fears his death
I pity the poor immigrant
Whose strength is spent in vain
Whose heaven is like ironsides
Whose tears are like rain . . .
Who falls in love with wealth itself
And turns his back on me
Although he ”fills his mouth with laughing” and “builds his town with blood”, after all is said and done he’s “always left so alone,” a man
Whose visions in the final end
Must shatter like the glass
I pity the poor immigrant
When his gladness comes to pass
The song is backed by a lilting country melody with Burton’s dobro, Emmons’ pedal steel guitar, and Stills on bass. It has a Da, da-
da-da-da, da da rhythm that contrasts with the song’s poignant lament but makes that lament stand out rather than weakening it, and underscoring the pity. It's clear Dylan thinks his immigrant is a sad if destructive and dangerous character. Collins’ singing is full of pathos, and her tempo and inflection make the song flow with an unhurried naturalness like a river to the sea.
Next comes a tender reminiscence by a Scottish singer-songwriter from the Incredible String Band named Robin Williamson (I had
to look it up), “First Boy I Loved”, gender-switched to fit her. Somewhat older, the narrator's looking back to when they knew each other at seventeen but haven’t seen each other for many years, and she “will sing this sad goodbye song”. She remembers the last time she saw him, his long hair “falling in our faces as I kissed you” and him telling her that he had “joined the church of Jesus.”
And I want you to know, I just had to go
And I want you to know, we just had to grow
And you’re probably married now, house and car and all
And you’ve turned into a grownup man, a stranger
And if I was lying by you now, I wouldn’t be here at all
I never slept with you
Though we must have made love a thousand times
We were just young, didn’t have no place to go
They “parted so hard”, and “in the sad morning/And the lonely midnight” she still thinks of him. But she has no regrets - time and life have moved on.
So it’s goodbye, first love and I hope you’re fine
I am a sweet man’s woman
Maybe someday we’ll have babies fine
He’s a true friend of mine
The stance the song takes is one of a free spirit reminiscent of “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” Collins’ acoustic rhythm guitar leads the song while Stills plays a restrained electric guitar as he does on most of the songs, with Etheridge and Gordon on bass and drums, backing another nice, somewhat free-verse melody with quiet accompaniment, including gentle drumming that lets Collins’ voice stand out, as is true throughout the album. And again Collins’ timing makes the irregular rhythm sound as smooth as the Mississippi at New Orleans. The emotional expression in her voice is so in tune with the song that it feels like she’s singing about her own first love.
“First Love” is followed by her classic rendition of Leonard Cohen’s wonderful “Bird on the Wire”. I have several albums with covers of the song, by Rita Coolidge, Jennifer Warnes, and three recordings on studio and live albums by Cohen. Collins’ version here is by far the best, even better than later versions by Cohen with a band.
Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free
Like a baby stillborn
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me
It’s a sober reflection on a life partially lived (he was 35 when it was released with his Songs from a Room album), a man who is recognizing his imperfectness, owning damage done with a willingness to make amends, but uncertain how self-serving he is in trying to be free. She alters the lyrics some to make it the best version lyrically, to my taste.
There was a man, a beggar leaning on his crutch
He said to me “Why do you ask for so much?”
There was a woman, a woman leaning in a door
She said “Why not, why not, why not, why not ask for more?”
The song ends by repeating the first verse with the line that’s the center of the song: “I have tried in my way to be free”. Like every song on the album, it’s sung and played with a relaxed, unhurried tempo and a wonderful sense of timing that’s like the singing of a Sinatra or Tony Bennett, or Lady Gaga in her duets with Bennett of Great American Songbook tunes. Not just technical perfection, it's a master vocalist’s rhythm and inflection that strengthens the beauty and the emotional power of each song. She sings it with all the authority that Cohen brings to it plus the strong and the beautiful voice that Cohen lacks, although Cohen can be her equal in sense of timing and restrained but evocative emotional expression if he has good musicians behind him. I’d probably give this song the nod as best and favorite song on the album, but only by a hair.
The last song on the album is a superbly haunting rendition of the traditional folk standard “Pretty Polly” that gets under a listener’s skin with a foreboding chill. It’s a reaching back to the beginning of her career recording covers of traditional English, Scottish, and Irish folk songs. Polly is persuaded by her fiancé to “go along with me/Before we get married some pleasure to see.” She climbs up behind him on his horse but later tells him she fears that he intends to murder her.
Polly, pretty Polly, you guessed it about right
Polly, pretty Polly, you guessed it about right
I’ve been digging your grave for the best part of last night
The last line of the verse hits with a shock that's like a hammer blow. He' doesn't try to deny what he's doing, and he says it with a frankness that suggests pleasure at his power over her and a complete absence of feeling. He's one coldblooded son of a bitch! She begs him to let her “be a single girl if I can’t be your wife”. But he stabs her with a knife and buries her in the grave he’s prepared, “Leaving nobody there but the wild birds to moan”.
A debt to the devil, Willie must pay
A debt to the devil, Willie must pay
For killing Pretty Polly and running,
And running, and running, and running away
I’ve heard other versions, including the Byrds’, which is good, but the Byrds’ take is an uptempo version that sounds like a folk singer running through a standard because it’s part of a repertoire, and it doesn’t have the haunting quality that Collins’ singing does. Collins slows the tempo down and sings it with a chilling and dreamy voice that lets the listener absorb the terror at what is happening, and we feel its echo in events reported in today’s nightly news. Like “Poor Immigrant”, it’s a song about a psychopath, but instead of Dylan’s psychological and generalized portrait, “Pretty Polly” is a narrative account of a specific event without the psychology. It's the description of the actions and the dialogue between murderer and victim that makes it so vivid. There's no suggestion of anything she's done to offend him, and a motive for the crime isn't even hinted at.
The song is backed by somber and ominous music from the basic band, plus Van Dyke Parks on electric piano, supporting what Collins does with the melody that makes it feel like a headline story on your local newscast about the murder of someone you've passed on the street in your neighborhood. It's the potential dark side of the romantic attraction in “Someday Soon” to the man who will take you away from the humdrum existence you’re used to, “the man your mother told you about” as the familiar cliché goes. It’s a song with a haunting beauty that provides a dramatic conclusion to the album.
This album is by far the best of half a dozen good albums by Collins I’ve heard. It sounds like an album made with a group of musicians very comfortable with each other playing relaxed with great sensitivity and perfectly entrained. When I listen to it today, it’s as fresh and emotionally satisfying as it was over fifty years ago. It takes me away from wherever I am and I feel like I’m inside the song with each and every tune.
