What Are You Getting At?

[Image: “Mean,” 2007, brass sign by Danish artist Kasper Sonne. (Original here.)]

From whiskey river:

Dew Light

Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

(Stephen Fry, from Moab Is My Washpot)

…and:

Can we have the aspiration to identify more and more with our ability to recognize what we’re doing instead of always identifying with our mistakes? This is the spirit of delighting in what we see rather than despairing in what we see. It’s the spirit of letting compassionate self-reflection build confidence rather than becoming a cause for depression.

(Pema Chödrön, from Taking the Leap)

Not from whiskey river:

An idea you have might not be original — Aristotle will always have thought of it before you. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original. Men love women. It’s not an original idea. But if you somehow write a terrific novel about it, then by a literary sleight of hand it becomes absolutely original. I simply believe that at the end of the day a story is always richer — it is an idea reshaped into an event, informed by a character, and sparked by crafted language. So naturally, when an idea is transformed into a living organism, it turns into something completely different and, likely, far more expressive.

On the other hand, contradiction can be the core of a novel. Killing old ladies is interesting. With that idea you get an F on an ethics paper. In a novel it becomes Crime and Punishment, a masterpiece of prose in which the character can’t tell whether killing old ladies is good or bad, and in which his ambivalence — the very contradiction in our statement — becomes a poetic and challenging matter.

(Umberto Eco [source])

…and:

Dreams

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,
mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—
in a split second the dream
piles before us mountains as stony
as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains
with perfect infrastructures.
Without engineers, contractors, workers,
bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—
raging highways, instant bridges,
thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—
crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us
and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,
without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—
on the path a sudden house just like a toy,
and in it vast halls that echo with our steps
and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—
a specific watch, an entire fly,
on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,
a bitten apple with teeth marks.

And we—unlike circus acrobats,
conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists—
can fly unfledged,
we light dark tunnels with our eyes,
we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,
talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,
the choices of our heart, our tastes,
we’re swept away
by amorous yearnings for—
and the alarm clock rings.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,
the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,
the doctors with couches for analyses—
if anything fits,
it’s accidental,
and for one reason only,
that in our dreamings,
in their shadowings and gleamings,
in their multiplings, inconceivablings,
in their haphazardings and widescatterings
at times even a clear-cut meaning
may slip through.

(Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak [source])

I was amazed to learn, after hearing it for years, that among the most “mysterious” songs in all of rock music was a little, apparently inconsequential number called “Sally Go ‘Round the Roses,” performed by a girl group called The Jaynetts.

In terms of audibility, true, the lyrics to “Sally” were a little fuzzy. In fact, all I could make out was the couplet  Saddest thing in the whole wide world/See your baby with another girl. Obviously, the song had to do with jealousy, and a breakup. What else could there be to say about it?

Once I actually read the lyrics, though, I “got” it:

Sally Go ‘Round the Roses
(Lona Stevens and Zell Sanders)

Sally go ’round the roses (Sally go ’round the roses)
Sally go ’round the roses (Sally go ’round the pretty roses)

Hope this place can’t hurt you (hope this place can’t hurt you)
Roses they can’t hurt you (roses they can’t hurt you)
Sally don’t you go, don’t you go downtown
Sally don’t you go-o, don’t you go downtown
Saddest thing in the whole wide world
Is see your baby with another girl
Sally go ’round, oh Sally don’t you go
Sally don’t you go, Don’t you go downtown
Oh, don’t you go downtown
Saddest thing in the whole wide world
See your baby with another girl

Sally go ’round the roses (Sally go ’round the roses)
Sally go ’round the roses (Sally go ’round the pretty roses)

They won’t tell your secret (they won’t tell your secret)
They won’t tell your secret, Oh no won’t tell your secret
Sally baby cry, let your hair hang down
Sally baby cry, let your hair hang down
Sit and cry with the door closed
Sit and cry so no one knows
Sally baby cry, let your hair hang down
Sally baby cry, let your hair hang down
Saddest thing in the whole wide world
See your baby with another girl

Sally go ’round the roses (Sally go ’round the roses)
Sally go ’round the roses (Sally go ’round the pretty roses)
Sally go ’round the roses (Sally go ’round the pretty roses)

[Fade]

Sally go ’round the roses (Sally go ’round the pretty roses)

The original song went to #2 on the Billboard charts; afterward — and for that matter, before — The Jaynetts left pretty much no impression on musical history. But it greatly influenced the sound of what would become acid rock, for its dreamy-hypnotic sonic properties and (yes) its mysterious lyrics. Among its early coverers was a band called The Great Society, whose lead singer — Grace Slick — would soon depart for much greener (and trippier) pastures with Jefferson Airplane. Indeed, The Great Society’s live recording of “Sally,” over twice the length of the original, seems to point straight to “White Rabbit” and Haight-Ashbury: