It’s been said that the ego is an excellent servant but a terrible master. I’m talking about the ego as a fundamental part of the psyche, our conscious decision maker and action originator, and the sense of who we are consciously aware of being, rather than the sense of worth and power ("getting a big head" is an inflation of the ego). Psychologist Robert Moore likened the ego to the general of the psyche, rather than the Commander in Chief, as in the US president who has the ultimate authority in the US government to approve or direct what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense do. Who is the Commander in Chief in the human psyche? Carl Jung believed in and provided extensive evidence for a part of our unconscious mind which he labeled the Self that is a source of intuitive wisdom that we all have, if we know how to relate to it and read what it tells us. It’s become custom to capitalize it to distinguish it from the self we are aware of and consider ourselves to be, more akin to the ego or self-image.
Virtually everyone has probably had the experience of having an intuitive thought that provided an insight or solution to a problem without having a sense of where the thought came from or how it was arrived at, because it wasn’t something that was reasoned or “thought out.” The Greek mathematician Archimedes is reported to have had an instantaneous scientific insight as he stepped into his bath and saw the water rise. He may have reasoned out the language to state his scientific principle later, but the insight apparently was an instantaneous reaction to a visual experience that legend has it made him yell “Eureka [I have found it]” and run naked through the streets proclaiming his discovery. Such an insight may come in a dream or a daydream. The German chemist Friedrich Kekule said the structure of the benzene molecule came to him while daydreaming as an image of a uroboros (a snake eating its tail}, an ancient symbol in many cultures from ancient China to ancient Egypt and Greece. Again, the idea wasn’t a product of deliberate thought but a spontaneous, sudden insight when letting his mind wander in a state of reverie.
I recall recently waking up with an instant recognition of how judgmental I can be of people who have different values without any reflection on what might be valid in their point of view, in spite of thinking of myself as a nonjudgmental person who is rarely black-and-white in my thinking. I woke up with the insight immediately in my mind, without any memory of dreaming anything related to it. I’ve also had experiences of having a memory I was trying to retrieve, the words I was trying to find for a line of poetry, or the answer to a problem or decision come to me hours or days later when I gave up thinking about what I was searching for and focused my mind on other things or let my mind wander.
This doesn’t mean that directed, logical process thinking isn’t important and extremely valuable. It absolutely is. Our reasoning powers are used productively for most of us on a daily basis, but they don’t always work to give the answers we’re after, or they give us “answers” that don’t work for us. Our military strategies based on successful World War II tactics did not work no matter how much we bombed North Vietnamese supply lines on the Ho Chi Minh Trail or burned Vietnamese villages we suspected of supporting Viet Cong. We didn’t think the “hearts and minds” of the people were important. The idea that consumers are rational decision makers that would act in their own economic self-interest has often given us policies that didn’t produce the economic results we expected. Economic patterns appear to operate from emotional factors and at times don’t even function in a person’s own best economic interests. Maybe that’s why economics has been called “the dismal science.”
This raises the question of how much we can rely on what our intuition and unconscious minds tell us. But consider: the human unconscious is the result of billions of years of evolution that reaches ultimately back to the beginning of cell specialization in bacteria that resulted in the development of separate cells into different organs. So the brain is the network of all the connections that have evolved in successive species over all that time that proved advantageous for survival. As a result, it includes many instinctual functions that do not involve conscious deliberation as well as neural wirings that don’t dictate specific instinctual reactions but give us the potential for a range of possible behaviors that had survival value at some time in the past. It helps to understand that Darwin’s concept of natural selection was not the “survival of the fittest” in the sense of who could kill and eat or outrun whom, but that our evolutionary development proceeded on the basis of who survived long enough to produce offspring, along with mutations which helped that. Some think that social skills involving cooperative behavior were the most important factor that allowed human evolution to progress.
We’re therefore endowed with mental networks which facilitate behavior patterns that had survival value at some point in our evolutionary development but may not always be helpful now. We live indoors protected from large predatory animals because we've exterminated them in areas where most of us reside. We also have highly organized, mostly cooperative societies with police to enforce generally agreed on rules for acceptable behavior – the "social contract" – primarily to govern the tendencies toward violence and theft that humans have.
In spite of that we have instinctual reactions to perceived threats which may or may not be real and so don’t always work to our advantage – the fight-or-flight response. If I think there’s a tiger in the bushes along my path but there’s no tiger there, I survive if I avoid that path, even when there’s no need to. But if I think there’s no tiger in the bushes and there really is, I'll die. So there’s a degree of survival value in being a little paranoid, which also operates in us now in response to threats to our economic well-being, to our social status, or to our sense of self-worth. And if I have a history of experiencing violence, I may be hypersensitive to perceived threats and often perceive danger where there is none, or have an inordinate fear response in innocuous situations, fostering a chronic anxiety that interferes with living an effective life. This is what we call PTSD.
Our unconscious minds are networks of neural patterns that give us perceptual and behavioral tendencies with various degrees of accuracy and usefulness, as well as instant information that comes from the biological wisdom of eons of natural selection which has proved so advantageous that human beings have incorporated it into genetically programmed wiring in the nervous system. It’s no accident that we have the unconscious wisdom to know things that we don’t know we know and that surprise us when they rise to the surface of consciousness.
The problem then becomes: 1) how do I access the wisdom my unconscious mind has? and 2) how do I sort out the messages that tell the truth from the perceptions and impulses that were once reliably accurate and helpful but are no longer or rarely useful in my environment today? This is the point where the human ego steps in to play its role. After all, consciousness has developed through natural selection too. Jung and the psychologist Julian Jaynes proposed that humans did not always think the way we do, perhaps not until ancient Greece in the West. Jung believed that until that time, mental functioning was mostly a matter of perception -- a passive reception of information from the environment, combined with mostly unconscious decision-making, reacting from instinct in behaviors which were not consciously chosen or reasoned out. We mostly perceived and reacted rather than deliberated and made conscious choices. There were surely exceptions evidenced by the development of technologies like the bow and arrow, the wheel, planting for food, etc. But those would come from people with a reflective consciousness outside of the norm, much like the Da Vincis and Einsteins of modern times. The inventors of those technologies were the geniuses who could “think outside the box” and “dream of things that never were and ask ‘Why not?’” instead of just reacting without reflection.
We carry in us all that neural wiring for primitive perception and reflexive decision-making as well as our higher-order mental abilities. Sometimes they show up when we least expect it and may not be helpful. The most important functions of the ego are 1) to act as a filter to sort out what messages and impulses from the unconscious are useful wisdom and which are not and 2) to act as a mediator between the unconscious and the imagination on the one hand, and the objective environment we live in, on the other – the reality function. The unconscious dreams of possibilities. The ego deals with practical realities. We need both.
For many of us, our feeling-self resides largely in our unconscious minds, though this also depends on personality type. Most men and some women are more conscious of their thinking processes than their emotions. Alternatively, most women and some men are more conscious of their emotional reactions and deeply felt values than most men and some women, although there are men and women of both types and neither preference is more natural or effective even if more common. When stressed, we will usually give precedence to values which are most emotionally weighted, sometimes wondering why we did something we didn’t plan to do or intend. Under normal conditions, we rely on our preferred mode, either our thinking or feeling function.
We have intuitive reactions that “feel right,” even though at times they may go against what our rational minds tell us is true or what our values tell us to do, if we are open to them. It’s the ego’s job to decide when the “still small voice” is right. To do that, it needs an openness of mind and degree of flexibility. Rigidity breeds stagnation. The person who can’t change his mind is like the boulder that water simply flows around. It doesn’t stop the water from reaching the sea. Rigidity comes from categorical thinking – “this is always right or this is always true, and that is always wrong or false.” Rigidity also comes from what we’re taught and what the norm and custom in our culture is, and from “habit.” And it comes from fear of the unknown and fear of the judgment of others for straying from custom and the conventional – “That's not the way it’s done.”
Just as there is a degree of truth in a cliché, there is usually a degree of effectiveness in custom and convention. But conditions of life change, and old ways of doing things may lose their viability and require a different response. New technologies and new understandings in science require trying new ways of thinking and doing things. As William Blake said, “What is now proved true, was once only imagined.” If we only did things the way we’ve always done, we’d still be living in caves or pit houses. But we’re not, and we’re deeply indebted to those who had the flexibility to use their intuition and think outside the box of received wisdom and convention, and then figure out how to apply their intuitive insights in a practical way.
Brett Nelson
Trees: Almost Human
Trees are the members of the plant kingdom that feel most human to me. I love trees! Juniper – including alligator juniper, pinyon, bigtooth and Rocky Mountain maple, Gambel oak, cottonwood, mesquite, ponderosa, Douglas fir, quaking aspen, corkbark fir and limber pine on the crest of the Sandias – they seem to have personalities. In my fantasy life I can almost imagine them hearing my thoughts about their beauty or majestic size and sending back silent acknowledgement of my appreciation. I feel toward trees as I would toward any other sentient being, including feelings of respect, appreciation, admiration, curiosity, even love. But then I feel that way toward almost anything in the natural world, even stone. I think it’s no coincidence that there is a song titled “I Talk to the Trees” in Paint Your Wagon, and there are trees that walk and talk and aid Frodo Baggins and his allies in their fight against the Orc armies of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. There are talking trees in myths from India to Greece to Ethiopia to Ireland, some as oracles.
The most common tree throughout New Mexico where I live is juniper, with four species in the Sandia Mountains and the foothills: one-seed juniper, Rocky Mountain juniper, Utah juniper, and alligator juniper. The Forest Service estimates that one quarter of the state is covered by juniper forest. They grow abundantly in the high desert foothills, with a range of 3500-7000 feet throughout the state, living up to 300-400 years.
The higher mountains from about 7000 feet up are mostly covered in overlapping but ascending order in pinyon pine, ponderosa pine, white and Douglas fir, quaking aspen – flourishing where forest fires clear out the conifers until the evergreens grow back, and Engelman spruce, plus corkbark fir and limber pine near the crest of the Sandias. Cottonwoods cover the lowland areas near streams and rivers, along with coyote willow, screwbean mesquite and even mulberry along the Rio Grande, plus invasive Russian olive and salt cedar. There are also areas of Rocky Mountain maple and bigtooth maple with brilliant autumn reds and yellows in the Manzano Mountains southeast of Albuquerque, as well as Gambel oak throughout most of the mountain ranges of New Mexico, also colorful in the fall. The Sandias contain four of the seven climate zones from the Upper Sonoran and Transition zone to the Canadian and Hudsonian zones, so in effect you can travel from Mexico to Canada in the Sandias.
Quaking aspens are especially remarkable in that hundreds to thousands of trees in a given area grow from a single root that spreads to sprout trees all around it, which spread roots to sprout more and more trees. In the Wasatch Mountains of Utah an aspen forest with a single root system has been calculated to have over 47,000 trees covering 106 acres. It’s claimed to be the world’s largest living organism, as well as being one of the world’s oldest organisms at 14,000 years old. They quickly take over areas where evergreen forest has been eradicated by fire, until the slower growing fir and spruce can come back and take over, shutting out sunlight for the aspens, so you can see entire hillsides covered in gold in autumn where fires have cleared away the conifers.
Another remarkable tree present on the crest of the Sandia Mountains is limber pine. Limber pines grow on dolomitic soils, frequently in severe conditions at the crest of mountains. Like the long-lived bristlecone pines in the Sierras, one of which has been verified at 4855 years as the oldest individual of any species, limber pines grow to great age. The age of one in Saskatchewan with a circumference of 185” was extrapolated from a core sample to be 3000 years old. Others have been confirmed to be 1140 to 1700 years and one “documented” to be over 2000 years. They can grow as tall as 65-80 feet but are typically stunted when they grow at treeline. The ones I’ve photographed on the edge of Sandia Crest were 15-20 feet tall, with branches growing mostly in the leeward direction. They’re the Desert Fathers of tree species, living austerely in harsh conditions where few species can survive.
Ponderosas are the opposite, growing tall and straight at middle elevations around 7500-8500 feet. They’re the middle America of evergreens, like the maple and oak of broadleaf trees. They spread the forest floor with their needles, minimizing the underforest cover and often creating a park-like forest with lots of open space. They’re sometimes called vanilla pine due to the fragrance of their bark. Their long needles and regular crowns make them attractive trees that create a peaceful aura. Another interesting small tree found in the lower Sandia slopes and foothills is mountain mahogany, with spiraling feather-like white plumes that extend from the branches.
The Fremont cottonwoods that line the banks of the Rio Grande and other permanent and intermittent watercourses away from mountains have become one of my favorite trees as I’ve discovered the network of trails in the Rio Grande Bosque (bosque is Spanish for forest). Often knobby and twisting, they also sometimes grow tall and straight when close together, making a pretty and pleasant forest to hike through. In the same genus as aspen with leaves that are very similar, they flutter in the wind like aspen and turn bright gold with the coming of autumn, then a golden brown as the season progresses. The bosque is a ribbon of gold in early fall, a cheery sight to see every year. Cottonwoods often grow in unexpected directions. Sometimes their trunks will even turn and grow horizontally near the ground, but more commonly limbs twist in surprising directions, creating a wildness in their appearance that I love, making for striking photographs at times. Bare trees in winter reveal the profuse growth of very small branches at the end of larger branches, looking like brushes.
The other trees that turn brilliant gold in autumn in the bosque are mesquite trees, which I thought of as growing only in Texas. They’re generally small trees, but I’ve seen some twenty to perhaps twenty-five feet tall. Some mesquite trees have bean pods that can be as long as fifteen inches. They can also have wickedly sharp dark red thorns up to at least three inches. You can even find mulberry trees with delicious fruit in the Bosque north of Rio Bravo Boulevard in the south valley.
Maria Popova’s online post in The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), of 1/22/2023 about trees’ intelligence and wisdom branches itself like a tree into link after connected link from a multitude of sources with a mind-expanding network of awareness. It connects to a fascinating TED Talk by forest ecology researcher Suzanne Simard detailing her research findings with Douglas fir in British Columbia showing how a forest is not just a collection of trees, but a highly sophisticated underground network of chemical information-sharing much like a brain. They have “hub trees” or “mother trees” which monitor and nurture and protect younger trees, especially seedlings, to grow and sustain a forest over time. Fungal networks connect the roots of trees and carry nutrients like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, amino acids, and water to the trees that need them most, supplying the fungi with sugars in a symbiotic relationship. She points out how clear-cutting destroys the network over time and spreads disease, resulting in the monster forest fires we are seeing in the 21st century.
So a forest is an organism with a brain, not a collection of individual trees, with strands of fungus making connecting roots like the neurons in my brain. They even use glutamate, the most common neurotransmitter in the human brain. So I think it’s not surprising that I seem to feel a presence when I walk through a forest and have something like a silent conversation with them, not in words but more like in feelings and attitudes of appreciation, respect, and recognition of their individual personalities. And I’m not entirely sure they’re not listening in some way science can’t yet fathom. At least it pleases me to imagine so.
Brett Nelson
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Looking for the Veedon Fleece – Van Morrison, Part One
How do I write about Van Morrison? Fiercely individualistic, he’s unlike anyone else I can think of. I first became aware of him from his infectious 60s hit single “Brown-Eyed Girl,” though I’d heard his classic “Gloria” in the version by the Shadows of Knight on radio. He then had a hit single with “Domino,” which was exhilarating and fun. But I wasn’t very familiar with his music until I read Greil Marcus’ 6-page rave-up on him in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, an exhaustive review of his music and its antecedents in blues, jazz, country, and gospel – even folk music. I’m not sure whether I bought his album Moondance before or after reading that. Moondance is a classic album of great songs without a miss-hit on it. The jazz-flavored ballad “Moondance” got a lot of airplay on radio:
You know the night's magic, seems to whisper and hush
You know soft moonlight, seems to shine in your blush
Can I just have one more Moondance with you, my love?
Can I just make some more romance with a-you, my love?
“Into the Mystic” is perhaps the most quintessential Morrison song, although Morrison has so many sides to him that it’s hard to say that about any song. The “Mystic” is a territory for Morrison that has to do with romance, soul, and ultimately identity. In his early albums it’s a nonreligious territory of the spirit that he continually reaches for, something suggestible but undefinable.
We were born before the wind
Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won
As we sailed into the mystic
Hark, now hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic
And when that fog horn blows
I will be coming home
And when that fog horn blows
I wanna hear it, I don't have to fear it
And I wanna rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
Then magnificently we will float
Into the mystic
“Caravan” is probably my favorite song on the album, a celebration of a gypsy-like group of “all my friends,” presumably musicians and fellow-travelers roaming the countryside:
And the caravan is on its way
I can hear the merry gypsies play
Mama, Mama look at Emma Rose
She's playin' with the radio
Turn up radio and let me hear the song
Switch on your electric light
Then we get down to what is really wrong
I long just to hold you tight, so baby I can feel you
Sweet lady of the night, I shall reveal you
If you will turn it up, turn it up, little bit higher, radio
Turn it up, that's enough, so you know, it's got soul
Radio, radio, turn it up
The song builds in intensity that gets under your skin until it ends in extended la-la’s with a pulsing backbeat that lifts you into the air. Morrison can do more with la-la’s than any singer I know.
“Brand New Day” is a soaring song of suffering and redemption from suffering:
I was lost and double crossed
With my hands behind my back
I was long time hurt and thrown in the dirt
Shoved out on the railroad track
But I stood and looked, and my eyes got hooked
On that beautiful morning sun
And the sun shines down all on the ground
Yeah, and the grass is oh so green
And my heart is still, and l’ve got the will
And I don’t really feel so mean
Here it comes, here it comes
Here it comes right now
And it comes right in on time
Well it eases me, and it pleases me
And it satisfies my mind
And it seems like, and it feels like
And it seems like, oh yes it feels like
A brand new day, yeah
A brand new day
The rest of the songs are all good. It’s his most completely realized and accessible album.
I went on to buy His Band and Street Choir, St Dominic’s Preview, Astral Weeks, Veedon Fleece, Tupelo Honey, and Hard Nose the Highway in fairly quick succession over the next several years. Every time I got familiar with the latest album I’d bought I’d want still more of his music. I still listen to them often 50 years later, except for the one-of-a-kind Astral Weeks, which occupies an ethereal and unclassifiable musical territory, though I love its songs “Cypress Avenue,” “Beside You,” and even “Madam George,” a 9 ½ minute song about a transvestite caught in the police raid of a party:
Down on Cyprus Avenue
With a child-like vision leaping into view.
The clicking clacking of the high-heeled shoes . . .
Marching with the soldier boy behind . . .
And the smell of sweet perfume comes drifting thru
On the cool night breeze like Shalimar
In the corner playing dominoes in drag
The one and only Madam George . . .
She says “Be cool, I think that it’s the cops”
Stands up, immediately drops everything she gots
Down into the street below
It’s a song about a scene far from anything most of us know, but it gets under your skin, painting a picture of a bold, almost larger than life character. Beside You” has some of Morrison’s most passionate singing, where he breaks free from restraints and pours his whole self into the song. He draws out the words “beside you” and just wails.
How does it get you when it gets you
When it gets ya
You may not know it's got you until you turn around
And I'll point a finger at you, point a finger at you
You say which way, which way
That's alright, we've gotten hip to it
Goin' to do it right now
Behind you, beside you, beside you
Oh child to never wonder why
To never, never, never, never wonder why at all
Never, never, never, never wonder why at all
My personal favorite Morrison album is his 1974 Irish-flavored roots album Veedon Fleece, described as “incandescent” by Greil Marcus. It was written mostly over three weeks back in Ireland after a three-month tour that left him exhausted and emotionally spent. The cover shows him sitting on the grass with two huge Irish wolfhounds, backed in the distance by an old Irish castle or mansion on a hill and an overcast sky. As with Moondance, it’s full of great songs with no misses, but there’s no attempt to score with songs likely to make the Billboard charts. The album didn’t sell well and was initially panned by Rolling Stone, but a raft of critics and musicians since have praised it to the heavens, some considering it his apex. It’s his most personal album, starting off with the mellow and mesmerizing “Country Fair,” followed by “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights” about a hard-drinking San Francisco Irishman who revenges himself on his enemies:
Linden Arden stole the highlights
With one hand tied behind his back . . .
Loved to go to church on Sundays
Even though he was a drinkin man
When the boys came San Francisco
They were looking for his life
But he found out where they were drinking
Met them face to face outside
Cleaved their heads off with a hatchet
Lord, he was a drinkin’ man . . .
And when they tried to get above him
He just took the law into his own hands . . .
And he loved the little children like they were his very own
The vocals are accompanied by a lilting and wistful piano that contrasts with the story of a Jekyll and Hyde lost soul. It ends with “He said ‘Someday it may get lonely’/Now he’s livin’, livin’ with a gun.” It’s immediately followed by “Who Was That Masked Man,” which starts in falsetto with
Oh, ain’t it lonely, when you’re livin’ with a gun
When you can’t slow down
And you can’t turn around
And you can’t trust anyone
You just sit there like a butterfly
You’re all encased in glass
You’re so fragile you just may break
And you don’t know who to ask . . .
You’re such a rare collector’s item
When they throw away what is trash . . .
When the ghost comes round at midnight
Then you both can have some fun
He can drive you mad, he can make you sad
He can keep you from the sun . . .
And no matter what they tell you
There is good and evil in everyone
It’s a very enigmatic song, impressionistic, mysterious, and haunting. Both “Linden” and “Masked Man” seem to strike deep in my soul so that the lyrics and the melodies replay in my mind a lot. Streets of Arklow” has a moody tone but, like “Caravan,” describes a joyful journey of a band of “gypsies” walking “in gay profusion in God’s green land.”
And our heads were filled with poetry . . .
And the gypsies rode with their hearts on fire. They said
We love to wander, Lord we love, Lord we love to roam . . .
And our souls were clean, and the grass did grow.
It’s a romantic picture with a beautiful and somewhat haunting melody that underscores a rapture the roving band feels for their landscape. Gypsies are a favorite symbol of freedom of spirit for Morrison. Gentle cascading piano and flutes provide the dominant instrumentation here as on most of the songs, with understated acoustic guitar -- unusual accompaniment for an album by Morrison, without the usual horns. Except for "Bulbs," it doesn't have the rock and roll punch, but it's expressive and a feast for the ears.
“You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River” is another moody but not melancholic tune with a philosophy summed up in the title, a nine-minute song describing a balancing act between being assertive and forceful but also humble enough to recognize you can’t push the world around. It’s a musical and lyrical statement I love of an attitude I’ve used as a touchstone to check myself on, and frequently quoted the title. But the song is an expression of a mystical journey “searching for the Veedon Fleece,” which seems to be a symbol of Morrison’s Holy Grail of all things spiritual and aesthetic, his expression of Joseph Campbell’s “treasure hard to attain.” It's backed by a lovely recorder accompaniment. Morrison keeps repeating lines and phrases over 8 minutes and 48 seconds until he mines everything emotional he wants to get out of the song.
We're goin out in the country to get down to the real soul,
I mean the real soul, people,
We're goin out in the country, get down to the real soul
We're gettin out to the west coast
Shining our light into the days of bloomin wonder
Goin as much with the river as not, as not, yeah, yeah
An' I'm goin as much with the river as not
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Blake and the Eternals oh standin with the Sisters of Mercy
Looking for the Veedon Fleece, yeah
William Blake and the Eternals oh
Standin with the Sisters of Mercy
Lookin for the Veedon Fleece, yeah
You don't pull no punches, but you don't push the river
The album also contains “Bulbs,” a rocker with a catchy and invigorating tune with a restrained but tasty electric guitar.
I'm kickin off from center field
A question of being down for game
The one-shot deal don't matter
And the other one's the same . . .
She's screamin through the alley way
I hear the lonely cry, why can't you?
And the batteries are corroded
And the hundred watt bulb just blew
Most of his albums have at least one uptempo rock and roll song like “Bulbs” that sticks in your mind and infectiously plays over and over. On 1972’s Saint Dominic’s Preview, it’s “Redwood Tree,” a poignant tale of a boy and his dog who “went out looking for the rainbow,” when the dog disappears.
Oh, redwood tree
Please let us under
When we were young we used to go
Under the redwood tree
And it smells like rain
Maybe even thunder
Won't you keep us from all harm
Wonderful redwood tree
The boy and his father
Went out, went out looking for the lost dog . . .
They did not bring him back
He already had departed
But look at everything they have learned
Since that, since that very day
It starts with the boy and his dog “running like a blue streak/Through the fields and streams and meadows/Laughing all the way,” proceeds to the boy’s heartbreak, and ends with innocence lost but wisdom gained, all expressed effectively in three short verses and a refrain with simple words and a jaunty, captivating melody. It’s a simple, touching song that often runs poignantly in my head.
Brett Nelson
Looking for the Veedon Fleece – Van Morrison, Part Two
The anchor of St Dominic’s Preview is in two ten- and eleven-minute songs. “Independence Day” is a dreamy and jazzy evocation of watching fireworks over boats in the harbor of San Francisco Bay, becoming a summer evening meditative ride that grew on me the more I listened to it until it became a favorite. “And it’s almost, and it’s almost Independence Day-y-ay.” The best song on the album is “Listen to the Lion,” a description and demonstration of his effort to reach down into his deepest well to pull out his most passionate expression, and an entreaty to his audience to listen for it. Greil Marcus had this to say about it in his article on Morrison in The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll:
Across eleven minutes he sings, chants, moans, cries, pleads, shouts, hollers, whispers, until finally he breaks away from language and speaks in Irish tongues . . . until he has loosed the lion inside himself. He has that sound, the yarrrrrgh, as he has never had it before. He is not singing it; it is singing him.
But Morrison can be sweet and mellow, as on “Tupelo Honey,” from his album of the same name.
You can take all the tea in China
Put it in a big brown bag for me
Sail right around the seven oceans
Drop it straight into the deep blue sea . . .
You can't stop us on the road to freedom
You can't keep us cause our eyes can see
Men with insight, men in granite
Knights in armor bent on chivalry
She's as sweet as tupelo honey
She's an angel of the first degree
She's as sweet as tupelo honey
Just like honey, baby, from the bee
It's his most beautiful love song, maybe the most beautiful love song I know – mellow but with an intensity of feeling that transports the listener to some intergalactic space. I ran across a YouTube video of a well-oiled Robbie Robertson playing the song for film director Martin Scorsese and a couple other people. As they listen silently, they all look transfixed, Robertson with his eyes closed and moving his head side to side with the music. Scorsese can’t stop beaming as if he’s never heard anything like this before. The beautiful woman in the video, perhaps Robertson’s wife, listens with eyes so intent and alert she looks like every note is filling her whole being. It’s as mesmerizing as “Listen to the Lion.” Morrison is a romantic in the broadest sense, not just in the love song sense: “You can’t stop us on the road to freedom/You can’t keep us cause our eyes can see/Men with insight, men in granite/Knights in armor bent on chivalry.” Chivalry wasn’t just about love but a code of behavior.
Tupelo’s uptempo rocker is “Wild Night,” a top 40 hit about going out to strut on the street in high fashion that Morrison elevates to the exuberant celebration that rock and roll is at its infectious best.
All the girls walk by
Dressed up for each other
And the boys do the boogie-woogie
On the corner of the street
And the people, passin' by
Stare in wild wonder
And the inside juke box
Roars out just like thunder
And everything looks so complete
When you walk out on the street
And the wind catches your feet
And sends you flyin, cryin
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh-wee
The wild night is callin
Hard Nose the Highway is a somewhat uneven album that has some wonderful gems on it, especially “Purple Heather,“ Morrison’s nearly six-minute version of the folk classic “Wild Mountain Thyme” in which a smitten young man asking a young woman
Will ye go, lassie, go
To the wild mountain thyme
All along the bloomin heather
If ye will not go with me
I will surely find another
And we’ll all go together
To the wild mountain thyme
All along the bloomin heather
Will ye go, lassie, go
The song builds in intensity with a power absent in any other singer’s version I’ve heard, including a beautiful cover by Roger McGuinn, driven by a galloping piano that almost thunders and pulsing violins that carry the song to a soaring climax. Every time I hear it, I don’t want the song to end. “Autumn Song” is another of Morrison’s tasty forays into jazz, a mellow reverie about building a fire in the hearth and roasting chestnuts with friends coming round to sing with in the evening.
A little later friends will be along
And if you feel like joining the throng
You just may feel like singing autumn song . . .
You'll be smiling, eyes beguiling
And the song on the breeze
Calls my name out in your dreams
Chestnuts roasting outside
As you walk with your love by your side
And the old accordion man plays mellow and bright
And you go home in the crispness of the night
The album also contains a jazzy cover of “(It Ain’t Easy) Bein Green,” the Kermit the Frog song with its initial lament about not being something more colorful than green but ends up finding beauty in what he is. Morrison elevates the song to prime jazz.
It's not easy bein' green
It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things
And people tend to pass you over
'Cause you're not standing out like flashy sparkles
On the water or stars in the sky
But green is the color of spring
And green can be cool and friendly
And green can be big like an ocean
Or important like a mountain or tall like a tree
When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why
But why wonder, why wonder?
I am green and it'll do fine, it's beautiful
And I think it's what I wanna be
I just want to be what I wanna be
Morrison’s timing on the song is delightful. The musicians on both these jazzy songs as well as “Independence Day,” like always with Morrison’s music, are superb. Taken together, they’re a wonderfully soothing listen, but with energy that keeps you feeling alive and awake.
After Hard Nose the Highway Morrison had a long string of albums of uneven quality with flashes of excellent music, including one top 40 hit with the soaring “Wavelength” and the dynamic exception of No Guru, No Method, No Teacher with its spiritual/religious overtones. But 1988 saw the release of Irish Heartbeat by Morrison and the great Irish band The Chieftains, melding his songs with traditional Irish music, all backed by The Chieftains’ sound. The exception to that mix is the achingly beautiful and deeply soulful “Raglan Road,” a 1964 poem by Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh which set to music sounds for all the world like a 200-year-old traditional Irish ballad.
On Raglan Road on an Autumn Day,
I saw her first and knew
that her dark hair would weave a snare
that I may one day rue.
I saw the danger, yet I walked
along the enchanted way
and I said let grief be a falling leaf
at the dawning of the day.
On Grafton Street in November,
we tripped lightly along the ledge
of a deep ravine where can be seen
the worth of passions pledged . . .
On a quiet street where old ghosts meet,
I see, I see her walking now
away from me, away from me so hurriedly
my reason, my reason, my reason must allow.
For I have wooed not as I should
a creature made of clay.
When the angel woos the clay he’ll lose
his wings at the dawn of the day.
I feel a sweet heartache every time I hear it. The song has a beautiful melody with a melancholic accompaniment. The lines “and I said let grief be a falling leaf/at the dawning of the day” may be the best lines of poetry I know. His singing on the song and on a traditional ballad titled “Cerrickfergus” touch depths of sadness rarely reached on any songs I’ve heard – especially in the last two lines of “Carrickfergus,” the lament of a rover who is “rarely sober” who’s lost at love and whose friends have all passed away. It hits you as Morrison’s voice drops after the briefest of pauses when he sings “down”.
But I am sick now and my day are numbered
Come all ye young men and lay me down.
In 1990 he came out with Enlightenment, which I think is his best album since the 70s, although a long Wikipedia article on Morrison inexplicably doesn’t even mention it. The songs on it are all good, led by “Enlightenment,” a song that turned the subject of Zen Buddhism and meditation into an unlikely radio hit, his first since 1978’s “Wavelength,” with words that linger in your mind like a soothing massage:
Chop that wood
Carry water
What's the sound of one hand clapping
Enlightenment, don't know what it is
Every second, every minute
It keeps changing to something different
Enlightenment, don't know what it is
Enlightenment, don't know what it is
It says it's non-attachment
Non-attachment, non-attachment
I'm in the here and now, and I'm meditating
And still I'm suffering but that's my problem
Enlightenment, don't know what it is
“Chop wood, carry water” as the prescription for what you do after enlightenment just like before enlightenment and the classic koan “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” are cliches in our Buddhist-influenced world now, but Morrison always seems to have a way of making cliches seem fresh with recovered potency, something I can’t explain but have repeatedly felt in many of his lyrics. The song’s relatable because he’s nowhere near enlightenment, “but that’s my problem.” He’s on the path and has a purpose, a labor of love. The song is followed by the lovely “So Quiet in Here,” an evocation of a meditative state, though not overtly about meditation. It’s accompanied by supremely soothing music that rises and falls but isn’t Lawrence Welk.
Foghorns blowing in the night
Salt sea air in the morning breeze
Driving cars all along the coastline . . .
The warm look of radiance on your face
And your heart beating close to mine
And the evening fading in the candle glow
This must be what it's all about
Oh this must be what it's all about
All my struggling in the world
And so many dreams that don't come true
Step back, put it all away
It don't matter, it don't matter anymore
Oh this must be what paradise is like
This must be what paradise is like
It's so quiet in here, so peaceful in here
It's so quiet in here, so peaceful in here
“Youth of a Thousand Summers” is infectious uptempo rock and roll accompanied by mellow horns and British rocker Georgie Fame on a lively organ. It seems to be an evocation of some sort of archetypal youth figure with reference to Tennessee Williams’ “sweet bird of youth.” It’s followed by the eight-minute ode “In the Days Before Rock ’n’ Roll” with a spoken word intro by someone with an upper class British accent, all about listening to the American blues of Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry, Lightning Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, and Fats Waller from Radio Luxembourg on the “wireless,” as well as Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Little Richard, and other rock’n’rollers. It’s a delightful song.
I could go on, with Period of Transition, Into the Music; Poetic Champions Compose, Avalon Sunset. Twelve of his eighteen top 40 albums were issued between 1997 and 2017, but the two I bought from that stretch, Too Long in Exile and Three Chords and the Truth, were disappointing. Morrison’s career, like that of Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tony Bennett, Neil Young, Buddy Guy, Paul Simon, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, John Lee Hooker, and Paul McCartney, spans over fifty years of quality music. It’s rare for any musician to remain creative over that long a stretch. He’s one that has, widely respected by other musicians and still making albums that get praise in reviews, still looking for the Veedon Fleece.
