Wherever we go, there seems to be only one
business at hand - that of finding workable
compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and
the absurdity of the fact of us.
- Annie Dillard
Imagine this: You are standing in a light-soaked land, where everything you see is
but a pile of colourless stripes. You find it reasonable to call the colourless stripe
overhead "sky", and reasonable to call the colourless stripe at your feet "ice". But
you cannot put a name to any of the other stripes. The sun never sets, nor does it
really appear. There is no time. You have come a long way in search for the
absolute in solitude and austerity, far from the maddening crowd, and now you are
finally near the pole.
I stand in a wide flat land
No shadow or shade of a doubt
Suddenly you discover a few penguins posing for a group of American
tourists taking snapshots. They are tame! They are funny! They are adorable
because their impersonations of human dignity so evidently fail. But these little
clowns disturb the sublime beauty of the scene. You are struck by a terrible doubt -
what if you are really like one of them yourself?
Monkey in the middle
Keeps singing that tune
I don't want to hear it
Get rid of it soon
Now imagine that you are God, looking down at those creatures of the earth.
Would you find them endearing in their stupidity, their ambition, their lack of
perfection? It doesn't seem likely.
*Reading Annie Dillard's essay An Expedition to the Pole in Teaching a Stone to Talk, I suddenly felt that I understood Fat Man And Dancing Girl. When I got home and read Suzanne's lyrics, I saw the cracks in my understanding, but the feeling of inspiration lingered - I wanted to write as freely and powerfully as Dillard. Maybe Leonard Cohen is right when he sings: "There is a crack in everything. / That's how the light gets in."
And why is it necessary to understand a song you like anyway?
*
Fall in love with a bright idea
And the way a world is revealed to you
When the Franklin expedition set out for the North Pole in 1845, Dillard
tells us, the leader exclaimed: "The highest object of my desire is faithfully to
perform my duty." The men were in high spirits, full of Victorian pride and dignity
- their expedition had been carefully planned in the Royal Navy officers' clubs in
England.The two sailing ships were well and luxuriously equipped. Each one carried a 1,200 volume library, a hand-organ playing fifty tunes, china plate settings, cut-glass wine goblets, and sterling silver flatware. The officers' silver knives, forks and spoons were richly ornate and engraved with the owners' family crests. All men wore the impressive uniforms of Her Majesty's Navy.
The expedition, presumably, was yet another quest for perfection, for the absolute. These officers, living in a time when mankind had reached an unprecedented level of control over nature, believed that their human dignity would carry them to their triumph.
They were wrong. Years later, other expeditions would find the remnants of their party. Wearing only their uniforms, the members of the proud Franklin expedition had scattered in search for help. All the fancy equipment had proved to be of no avail in the land of sublime beauty. But some of the dead bodies still had their engraved sterling silver tableware with them...
*In the Cohen interview, Suzanne gives some information about the situation that made her write Fat Man and Dancing Girl. Someone was warning Suzanne - presumably the dancing girl with her secret - to be careful of someone else - the megaphone man who gives information to the world. But the nagging voice - that became the monkey in the landscape of a nightmare - proved to be right.
Stand on a tightrope
Never dreamed I would fall
There is also another inspiration to the song. When Suzanne finally met her
biological father, she learned that her grandmother had been a drummer in an all-girl band. According to some newspaper cuttings, her band had been performing
with "The International Fun Boy" Billy Purl, who advertised "beautiful girls
galore" in a circus-like manner. Although Suzanne obviously is pleased that there is
musicality in her blood, she must have mixed feelings about Billy Purl and his
"Show of Wonders".A terrible suspicion can be sensed in the song. What if Suzanne, the former dance student, is just selling her beauty to the crowd? What if the audience is secretly laughing at the pretentious songstress spilling her secrets with covered mouth and making a fool of herself like the dwarf in a freak show? What if she herself is the monkey?
Monkey in the middle
Keeps doing that trick
It's making me nervous
Get rid of it quick
Perhaps we are all pitiable monkeys making fools of ourselves in our futile and
undignified attempts to impersonate "human" dignity.
*When the Swedish balloonist Andreé was dying of starvation on a Arctic island, he confided in his diary: "Our provisions must soon and richly be supplemented, if we are to have any prospect of being able to hold out for a time."
When Suzanne as a child was about to drown in the ocean, she found herself saying: "Excuse me, please, but do you think you could come over here and take me out of this water, because I think I'm drowning."
*
I wanted to learn all the secrets
from the edge of a knife
From the point of a needle
from a diamond
from a bullet in flight
I would be free then
If we cannot find perfection in the physical world, we should be able to find
it in literature and art. At least this if often what I am looking for when I study a
song, a poem or a painting. I hope to find something that can transform my petty
life into pure beauty. To simple enjoy is not enough - life is too short for
amusements - and being a fan is outright humiliating.But, just as with the Franklin expedition, my pride is my hubris. To arrive at that final and perfect understanding, I need to cut away all my desires, all my personal whims and associations. Every distraction must be removed.
But the land of perfection is barren and empty until we come dragging with our absurd humanity. I realise that my interpretations are, and will always be, ridiculous but sincere expeditions to the pole, desperately seeking Suzanne.
I wanted to see how it would feel
to be that sleek
and instead I find this hunger's
made me weak
I believe right now if I could
I would swallow you whole
*The Norwegian explorer Amundsen had learned from the mistakes of his predecessors. He did away with knick-knack and superficial dignity and travelled like the Eskimos in sledges behind dogs. To minimize the need for provisions, he fed dogs to dogs on a schedule, and arrived triumphantly at the South Pole on 14 December 1911. But there is no poetry in that, he just robbed the map of yet another mystery.
They'll never ever reach the moon
At least not the one that we're after
It's floating broken on the open sea
Look out there my friends
And it carries no survivors.
- Leonard Cohen
*
And when I'm dead
If you could tell them this
That what was wood became alive
What was wood became alive
Are we really just making fools of ourselves, or do we like Sisyphus create our
own paradoxical dignity turning our small lives into songs and making our
expeditions to the pole? Only God knows, but if he exists, he won't tell us.But that importunate little monkey keeps saying that we are mistaken, that we are fooled. If we believe his warning, life loses its meaning, but if we stop listening, we lose the motivation to search for dignity - to transcend our human animality. We will never reach the pole, or the moon, but we can at least be trying.
Close to the middle of the network
It seems we're looking for a center
What if it turns out to be hollow?
We could be fixing what is broken
Hugo Westerlund