Welcome to Blessing All the Birds, a feminist fan project focused on the work of the musician and songwriter Joanna Newsom. We see Newsom's work as feminist literature and our goal is to provide it the serious critical analysis it deserves, as well as to discuss her unique place in popular culture.
Recently I finished reading Averno by Louise Glück, an astounding collection of poems inspired by the myth of Persephone, Hades, and Demeter. This, like most pieces of myth, is one with many avenues of meaning. One common path of interpretation is to read this myth at its surface level, as the story of Persephone’s abduction and rape by Hades, the god of Death (as a scholar of sexualized violence in Greek and Roman antiquity, this is my usual way into the myth). But many see the myth more metaphorically: it becomes the story of a young woman and the mother she left behind learning to cope with the monumental transition of Death (and relatedly, Death marks a sexual transition, as Persephone the maiden died and becomes a married woman and a Freudian psychosexual transition, the end of the relationship with our first intimacy with our Mother). But Glück in in her poetry appropriates the myth differently, presenting another version of Persephone—one who does not merely accept Death and the Life she left behind, but one who welcomes it precisely because Death may offer even less pain than existence.
With the ancient Greek myth as a prism for exploration, reflection, and understanding, Glück’s narrator asks the readers and herself what will happen when we, too, encounter the God of Death in the like Persephone (as Glück writes: “What will you do when it is your turn in the field with the god?”) Will we accept or even embrace Death? Will we dread it? Will we miss the opportunity to live because we are so paralyzed by its approach? Will we realize that Death is maybe not any worse than Birth and Life, which endow us with violence and pain? Will we see Death as a solution to the Pain of Birth (to quote Newsom here)? Overall, although Persephone can achieve this powerful, welcoming relationship with Death, the narrator in Averno who interprets her myth, cannot. She trades the pain of Life for the pain of Death. She welcomes neither Life nor Death, but, feeble, can do nothing to stop their progressive sufferings.
Glück’s narrator, moreover, throughout Averno maps her anxieties and questions about Death onto nature, onto the cycles of fields and the seasons, but we are reminded in several poems that nature does not approach this relentless cycle of Birth and Death with fear, with a “warehouse of memory.” We can create and consume art to sublimate these memories, these predictions, these fears of the pain Birth and Death bring, but nature continues on; whatever we project upon it and whatever it experiences matters little. We may lament a burned and scorched field (a recurring image in Averno), touting it as a symbol for what we now experience and what is to come, but the field grows back—differently, silently—despite what we feel and what we fear. The burned land lost the farmer a year, but what is that to the field?
All of this, of course, reminded me of themes found throughout Newsom’s corpus, especially on Divers and especially in the songs “Time, as a Symptom [TAAS]” and “Make Hay.” As we have explored, these songs ask many of the same questions with many of the same kinds of natural and agricultural imagery. They even allude to and negate one another specifically with the lyrics “If there was a way to reckon love/ except as a symptom of time?” and “Love is not a symptom of Time: Time is just a symptom of love.” But “TAAS” approaches Death with a guarded optimism, a hopeful plea, and an ending promise about achieving immortality through our love and relationships with others that “Make Hay” and Glück, as well, in Averno, tonally and thematically never want to approach.
“TAAS” posits (in part) that although we die, we do not die without a purpose, alone, with nothing to give, because we lived and created joy with others and we can in fact continue to live (immaterially) through the joy we left behind. The song begins with a mother looking at her child for the first time: the seat and continuation of her joy and life, although of course that joy is suffused with the fear that Birth and Death are hardly separate and cannot be unique ends of a binary, Glück’s same fear. “Make Hay,” on the other hand, posits (in part) that Death can be a solitary, abrupt, and material experience and we may leave nothing behind, stewing for years in our anxiety and bereavement about a purposeless, aimless life. Death in “Make Hay” is also something we do not accept or certainly do not welcome, but grieve and fear and misunderstand.
The differences between these songs’ dominant perspectives can be clearly seen through their use of agricultural imagery. In “TAAS,” there is reference to Demeter and Persephone and their maintenance of their mystery cult which promised eternal life (“a single ear of corn”). The song’s use of the Greek myth with the return of the daughter, Persephone, to her mother, Demeter, from the realm of Death, suggests that even if Death may not be escaped fully, it can be transcended. “Make Hay’s” agricultural references (especially “We sow and we reap, again”) never allude to the Greek myth and the hope it can bring to the dying and their loved ones, but only suggest the ineluctability of permanent Death and our lack of control over and understanding of that inexorable process (“How was I to know…it was before our time…”). It focuses on the painfully powerless time before and after the deaths of loved ones, not on immortality.
Averno helped me to clarify the divergent approaches about Life and Death in Divers (one which hopefully suggests permanence and purpose and the other more cynically denying it). I want to particularly share one excerpt from the poem “October” that starkly contrasted with “TAAS” but deepened my understanding of “Make Hay” (and this is one excerpt of many that echoed Joanna; admittedly everything always comes back to her corpus for me since it is the North Star for whatever I am reading):
The light has changed;
middle C is tuned darker now.
And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed. —
This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: you will not be spared.
The songs have changed; the unspeakable
has entered them.
This is the light of autumn, not the light that says
I am reborn.
Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered.
This is the present, an allegory of waste.
So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:
the ideal burns in you like a fever.
Or not like a fever, like a second heart.
The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.
They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.
They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.
And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly
in anticipation of silence.
The ear gets used to them.
The eye gets used to disappearances.
You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.
A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;
it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.
How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.
Maestro, doloroso:
This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.
Please feel free to read this book and talk to me about it. I am not claiming that Averno (published in 2006) is a direct influence on Joanna, but it surely can help us to illuminate her work. Many other similarities between Divers and Averno exist: they fixate on thresholds and borders, they both tackle the simultaneity and circularity of time (especially through natural and agricultural imagery) and there is a leitmotif throughout Averno of the soul, disassociated from the body, speaking the to narrator, a divide that drives the conflict in “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive.” Glück made me want to return analyzing Joanna’s poetry again after the second hardest year of my life (a year so bad I did not even have the emotional and intellectual energy to listen to any her albums more than once) and before Joanna returns to the stage in less than a month (I see her three times in New York in September with friends from near and far). Although I know from the events of this past year that I will never welcome Death with open arms like Glück’s Persephone or see joy in Life as a solace for Death like Joanna’s narrator in “TAAS,” these pieces of poetry have helped me to reflect on my anxieties and fears, happily, even for a bit.
Four years ago I read Louise Glück’s Averno for the first time with a group of friends (in a now defunct book group; do those ever really last?). The connections in my mind between the poetry collection’s representation of our relationship with death (through the eyes of Persephone, the daughter of the goddess, Demeter) and Divers felt undeniable to me even if I could not prove Newsom had ever read her.
And now as I (very slowly) write a more formal academic piece on Joanna’s use of ancient Mediterranean mythology to express and create her personal and lyrical feminist poetics, Glück looms large. There is little to no formal scholarship published on Newsom’s lyrics, which as a researcher and writer means I feel untethered and too free in my interpretations, but there is much on Glück, who can act as a precedent and an analogue for what I would like to say about the songs “Emily,” “Monkey & Bear,” and “Time, As a Symptom.” Glück, not only because of her work in Averno, but also because of Vita Nova, The Triumph of Achilles, and Meadowlands, has been called “a post-confessional personal classicist” by Elizabeth Dodd and others. This label feels appropriate and useful for understanding parts of Newsom’s corpus. Overall, feminist poets using classical mythology in their poetry becomes a way to both mirror and elevate the personal. Using myth, as Bonnie Costello argues, infuses poetry with centuries of meaning and authority but moreover continues the fluidity and adaptability of all storytelling and can help us to see that human experience is repeated, recursive, and immortal just like myth.
As I prepare that article and process much of the research for the aforementioned article, I wanted to return to this essay, which is the seed of much of what I will say. I stand by all I said in August 2019, but I offer an edited version of the essay with the new research I have done since it was first published. Thanks for reading this again (with its edits) and as always, let me know what you think!
After a two-year break from new posts and essays, I wanted to finally finish my chiastic analysis of Joanna Newsom's fourth album, Divers, by coming to its center and the song “The Things I Say” and b
After a long break from new posts and essays, I wanted to finally finish my analysis of Divers, chiastically, by coming to the center of the album and the song “The Things I Say” and by exploring and reflecting upon its relationship with its immediate neighbors and also with the entire album. But, breaking custom, there are two ways to engage in this overview of the chiastic pairing and thematic structure of Newsom’s fourth album: you can read my essay below or you can listen to me say something similar, but not, identical to what you can read below in my audio essay on Soundcloud.
Rachel Parent and I began a song by song analysis of Divers called “Delving into Divers” in 2015, shortly after the release of the album and we worked on it together until 2018. I am so proud of those essays. We moved through the album chronologically and collaboratively, from the first song to the last song and we even explored “Make Hay,” which is outside and almost an inverted mirror to the Divers cycle and thesis. We again and again showed that throughout the album there are many shared themes and motifs: the earth, the heavens, the family, mortality, immortality, transcendence, immanence.
But that project also convinced me that there was another, possibly more effective way to tackle all the songs on the album: chiastically, not chronologically, with the looping structure of “Anecdotes” and “Time As a Symptom” the guide and the key to this kind of analysis; as we know well, those songs lyrically and musically flow into one another (the prefix “trans” ending the album and “Anecdotes” beginning with the word “sending;” “transcending”), demonstrating that in the universe of this album, time moves both ways, backwards and forwards and forwards and backwards eternally. But this loop connected the songs as a pair, which intimately, uniquely, and amply echoed each other. And “Anecdotes” and “Time As a Symptom” were not alone. In another series on Divers, called “Divers and Chiasmus,” I argued that the all other songs on the album, paired from top to bottom, as we approached the center, manifested a similar chiastic conceit and structure.
I began this chiastic analysis shortly before the pandemic in 2019, intending to finish it within a year. Then I tried to motivate myself to finish by sharing the work of this series with a new audience on Instagram. That was fun, especially working harder to marry the songs to art history, but possibly a distraction. And now it’s...2023. But the pandemic happened (and is still happening; please wear respirator masks in all public indoor spaces to protect yourself and others from this disease that attacks all our blood vessels and thus, all of our organs), I had other research projects that occupied my work life, and then Joanna Newsom finally emerging from her palatial estate and bestowing music upon us made me realize I had to close the chapter on Divers before the new material arrives sometime in the future (if I am hopeful maybe...2025?)
Since 2019, I have completed a chiastic analysis of “Anecdotes” and “Time As a Symptom,” “Sapokanikan” and “A Pin Light Bent,” “Leaving the City” and “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive,” “Goose Eggs” and “Same Old Man,” as well as “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” and the title track, “Divers.” As a close to the “Divers and Chiasmus” series, I want to give an overview of these pairs and their connections among all the songs and move us towards my analysis of “The Things I Say,” the center of the album. How do we arrive at the center of the album through these pairs and what does the center say about the entire album and its most immediate neighbors? For the sake of length, I am going to assume some knowledge with what we have written previously about Divers (you can find all of our older essays here) and assume general knowledge of the lyrics and themes found Divers. I will not explore every nuance and analytical path as I have done previously. My overview of each chiastic pair and how we move to the center will be brief and allusive to our other work.
But many may be asking: what is chiasmus? It is a literary device found from antiquity onwards that at a thematic level creates interlocking, repeating, and echoing symmetries through shared words, images, and motifs over an entire work. This is repeatedly demonstrated in the paired songs on Divers. But we shouldn’t be under any illusions about the unity, order, and completeness of this type of analysis. Things are ordered and disordered simultaneously, a paradox embedded in the album. The chiastic, seemingly aligned structures ricochet throughout the album and can never be truly contained to two-song units. “Anecdotes” speaks to “Time As a Symptom,” but then also speaks to “Sapokanikan” and “A Pin Light Bent.” And it is important to keep in mind that chiasmus not only can highlight symmetries, but also important contrasts and divergences. Finally, it should be said Divers as a whole is united by paradoxical binaries (such as Life and Death, Man and Woman, Land and Water, Time and Space) that cannot be resolved, simplified, or discerned fully through their tensions and, in fact, cannot be reduced to binaries at all even if it easier to think of them as such. This lack of resolution, this lack of clear delineations, the wide, yet organized dispersal of themes must always be considered.
Let us begin from the first song and its chiastic partner and then work our way towards the center again. “Anecdotes” and “Time As a Symptom” ground us philosophically and thematically in an exploration of death and how we try to escape it, but also ground us in an exploration of how we care for that loss of ourselves and the others we love. Furthermore, we begin to see both a theme and leitmotif I have found throughout the album: the immateriality and materiality of gender, of transcendence and immanence. Men have access to transcendence (Time, Air, Immortality, and the Soul), while women are weighed down by immanence and their connection to Space, to the Earth, to the Body, to Mortality, to Death. When I first applied the terms “transcendence” and “immanence” to Joanna Newsom’s work in 2016, I was appropriating, redefining, and recontextualizing the work of feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and also that of the literary critic Roland Barthes’ on gender (who speaks to the literal and figurative mobility of Man and the literal and figurative immobility of Woman as a leitmotif and image in literature and myth). de Beauvoir in The Second Sex argues that men are allowed access to transcendence, meaning to creativity, culture, the intellect, the immaterial and immortal, while women in a patriarchal society are trapped by the concerns of the body, survival, the maintenance of life, enforced engagement with the material and mortal. Both of these theories, one on transcendence and the other on mobility, when considered in tandem, have implications for Divers. They help us to discern who controls Time, history, memory, erasure, the crossing of borders, immortality, who even is seen to be flying into the open air.
But “Anecdotes” and “Time As a Symptom” of course, diverge and refract. In “Anecdotes,” we begin with transcendence in the air (with the flying soldiers), then return to the immanence of the Earth (with the family and hearth and home). But in “Time As a Symptom” we begin with the materiality of birth (and hence the inception of death and mortality) and then transcend into the immortality of how we live through others and the love we create. By the end of “Anecdotes” we descend to the earth and in the end of “Time As a Symptom” we ascend to the heavens, only to return to “Anecdotes” in a loop. In “Anecdotes” the narrator poses a question about how we achieve “temporal infidelity,” a dislocation from the sovereignty of time and “Time As a Symptom” provides the answer. All the characters and narrators we see in Divers are mortal, but the love they (and we have brought) into the world is not. As Newsom sings in this last song on the album, “the moment of your greatest joy sustains” and nothing can take that away.
In “Anecdotes” we move from the air to the earth and in “Sapokanikan” we begin there, too. We are invited to contemplate urban space and a potter’s field in Washington Square Park, hiding history below our feet. But then we ascend into the air during World War I with the boy mayor of New York, John Purroy Mitchel, only to crash to earth. This echoes directly the experience of the flight attendant, Francoise de Moriere, who flies and then falls, letting us start “Time As a Symptom” on the earth too, at the beginning of a life, and thus the beginning of our immanence and death. (For as soon as we are born, we begin to die.) “Sapokanikan” and “A Pin Light Bent” display well the constant tension of air (or transcendence) and earth (or immanence) on the album and the connections of transcendence and immanence to time, how we make memories, and which gender writes history and has easier access to the immortality (for example, through art). In “A Pin Light Bent” the female flight attendant achieves immortality through her immanence, her return to the earth, through the art of a male poet, James Dickey, who writes about and objectifies an unnamed woman who has fallen from a plane into the American heartland, although we know that she is Francoise de Moriere, whose story was written about widely in the press before Dickey wrote the poem and who he said inspired it. Joanna Newsom keeps the woman unnamed, although the man in “Sapokanikan” who experiences a similar death has a name and a historical record. Is this a comment on power? If so, does it ultimately question or maintain the historical and cultural erasure of women? (I have always struggled with this question when listening to and analyzing “A Pin Light Bent.”)
“Sapokanikan,” which begins, as well with a reference to a poem—this time by Horace Smith—more directly asks questions about who arbitrates historical and cultural memory, and who has the power to immortalize and also erase through art and more. The answer the song posits is the “the powerful hand” of white men who erase women from their art and build monuments to themselves over the graves of the poor, enslaved, and indigenous. Both “Sapokanikan” and “A Pin Light Bent” with their plane crashes return us to immanence and death, but they both question who has the right and the opportunity to transcend that seeming ending: not women (or those in feminized positions like the indigenous Lenape, who established Sapokanikan as trading village in what is now called Greenwich Village). But Newsom, a woman, is also creating her own artistic monuments with these songs: Will they live on? How? Are they to herself? For herself? For us? Do artistic monuments matter more than the impact we have on those we love (as “Time As a Symptom” posits at the end of Divers)? Are we best remembered after death through the love we create or the art we create?
“Sapokanikan” never departs from urban space, although “A Pin Light Bent” has us fly away from the city (both songs highlighting New York, the Ur image of an American urban space). The flight attendant in the Dickey poem falls to the earth in rural space, so we assume Newsom’s song brings us there too. And this foreshadows the transition from the city to the rural in “Leaving the City.” Immortality or not in “Leaving the City” is not contemplated via urban palimpsests and urban accretions of history and colonization and erasure, but in the cycles of seasons and agriculture, winter being the entrance to Death, a Greek mythological understanding in the myth of Persephone, a prominent element in “Time As a Symptom.” In “Leaving the City,” we move horizontally in space, but when we come to its chiastic partner, “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive,” we have a vertical bird’s eye view of nature, civilization, the life on earth of the narrator. What was that narrator allowed “as they counted towards the end?” “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive” repeats and possibly even is the seat of—as the first song written for the album—the philosophical concerns of “Time, As a Symptom:” we are allowed only a finite time on this earth and the only truly lasting effect we can have is our effect on others and those we love. Death cannot take what was in our hearts and what we shared with others. This brings to mind the body/soul duality, a common and widespread philosophical and religious concern where the immortal and transcendent soul is separate from the mortal and immanent body (although, of course consciousness itself—which many, even atheists like me, call the “soul”—is embodied), is a false one if we remember how we truly achieve immortality: not through our souls per se, but through our connections with others.
When we move from “Leaving the City” to “Goose Eggs,” I have the impression that we have moved from East to West laterally, with some signs of an older California with its smoke stacks and coal. We also go up again in war planes. But moving from East to West signifies something different than the transition from immanence to transcendence that we have seen with vertical movement. The East implies the future or beginnings (the rising sun) and the West implies the past or endings (the setting sun). “Sapokanian” spoke about the past, but even in the end of that song, cities become harbingers of the future as well, especially as they constantly build over what came before. But this all leads me to say that when I first tried to analyze “Goose Eggs” in relation to its chiastic partner, “Same Old Man,” I struggled. I felt “Goose Eggs” spoke more in relation to “Leaving the City,” and “Same Old Man” spoke more to “Sapokanikan” and “Leaving the City.” “Same Old Man” is a traditional song which echoes a similar transition that the one “Sapokanikan” makes to “Leaving the City:” we move from the big city to the countryside, signified by the mill. “Same Old Man,” in addition, foregrounds the confrontation with the soul in “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive” as the narrator approaches death. We see this in the lines, “My mind is fading and my body grows weak/ And my lips won't form the words I speak/ And now I'm floating away on a barrel of pain/ New York City won't see me again...” This same song additionally shares concerns with the passing of seasons and the omnipresence and cyclicality of death that we find in “Leaving the City.” “Goose Eggs” continues the themes of war, flight, and migration in the first three songs and lays the foundation for the next war we see in “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne.”
Then, “Same Old Man” deepens the themes in the title track as we cross borders on land, primarily those of Time, Life, and Death and brings us another version of Joanna Newsom, who used to cover this song in another iteration during the Ys-touring era. In “Divers” the song, there are many versions of the woman narrator on the shore. Which version of Joanna Newsom do we meet here, performing “Same Old Man?” The older? The current one on Divers? Are they the same? Can the past and the present exist simultaneously? Where is that past version of Joanna? Is that past version of Joanna gone forever? Or can we revive her with “Same Old Man?” (These questions tie “Same Old Man” to “The Things I Say” quite saliently.) As we move towards the center of the album, maybe the chiastic patterns I have noted admittedly begin to break down—but not completely. “Goose Eggs” and “Same Old Man” focus on repetitions: of a traditional song by various artists, of the day and experiences, of movements of the windmill and production, of the cyclical migrations of humans and birds from East to West and back around again, of transitions between past and present, of mistakes in relationships. They both ask if we can ever leave a place or a memory or even the past itself.
As we come closer to the center of the album, we encounter “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” and “Divers” as the last chiastic pair. There we find women trapped at borders both spatial and temporal. Both women become repositories of memories, but they cannot create nor transcend memory themselves because of their gender and their connections to the immanence we have discussed. Men have left them at the borders to pursue knowledge and power. In “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” men ascend into the air and the narrator explains, tethered to earth, what happens to them as they enter the fourth dimension, colonize, wage war, and meet other versions of themselves. In “Divers,” the female narrator watches the divers cross the line between land and sea and determines that she will dive herself. On the album Divers, all the characters who cross borders and transcend are men, with the exception of the mother figure in “Time, As a Symptom” who transcends time through love. The female narrators in these songs can comment on time and its cycles, but cannot control them. And they will witness those repetitions again and again: the man diving into the water and John traveling into space. “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” and “Divers” furthermore not only emphasize repetitions within time, but acts of twinning and mirroring: both songs foreground confrontations of ourselves from the past or even other universes and multiple or even infinite versions of ourselves through time, space, and dimension. In “Divers” it becomes clearer that men and women can be mirrors of each other since they both desire the same autonomy and knowledge. But women are barred from crossing into the water and what it offers by patriarchy and gendered expectations and sanctions. As the narrator in “Divers” says: she “must abide, by the rules that bind [them].” That same female narrator on “Divers” wants to halt this repeating, historical process; she resists both notions of femininity and masculinity and time and space. She decides to leave the world of women and enter the realm of men and their knowledge, although we do not see it yet, as evidenced in the lyrics: “I'll hunt the pearl of death to the bottom of my life...”
And after that chiastic pair, we arrive to the center of Divers with “The Things I Say.” Here we should ask: how does it interact with its immediate neighbors and in fact all the songs? The sixth song of the album begins with a reflection, opening up a space for us to see those connections. To me, it seems we are in someone’s middle age, the album representing “the space of a day” and really someone’s lifetime (life and death also being represented through the changing of the seasons on “Leaving the City;” both representations drawing on rich literary and symbolic traditions through time, space, and culture). The song ruminates on memory, on the past, on time moving backward. In “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” we moved to the fourth dimension, but here although we seem to have a more conventional and mundane relationship with time, even just the simple act of remembering attempts to make the past and the present coexist. “The Things I Say” also speaks to the immortality of memory (“Saying this I won’t forget...”), which is a fraught but also confirmed concept on the album through “Time As a Symptom.” In the next verse of “The Things I Say,” the narrator explicitly asks if the past and the present can coexist and how: “What happened to the man you were, when you loved somebody before her? Did he die? Or does that man endure, somewhere far away?” This quote, of course, also prepares us for “Divers,” the title song, when that narrator contemplates the cyclical relationships of the male pearl divers with the women recurring along the shore and reflects back on “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” when versions of the characters in the multiverse literally meet. Which relationship is real in “The Things I Say?” Which one matters more? How different are we from ourselves in the past as we reside in the present and ruminate? The song relatedly asks this about whether there are multiple versions of ourselves we “carry around like a pack of cards.” This image cleverly materializes and spatializes time. Time and the versions of ourselves inhabiting those different eras becomes something we can understand as physical, which again leads us to “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” when the fourth dimension makes time material and spatial for those who experience it.
It appears to me in “The Things I Say” that the person trying to make their memories immortal is a man, even if the narrator, speaking to the man, could be a woman (“When the sky goes pink in Paris, France Do you think of the girl who used to dance/ When you'd frame her moving within your hands saying, ‘This I won't forget’”). As we have discussed here together and as I have postulated in my other essays, men on Divers can transcend time (and air). Women are immanent, which means they are attached to the mortal earth. The woman remembered is moving, she is a dancer (maybe even Francoise De Moriere herself from “A Pin Light Bent,” who was a dancer and a flight attendant), but she is immobile in time. The memory of the woman cannot seem to move through time. Neither can the narrator of “The Things I Say.”
At the end of the song, we hear lyrics from the song move backwards, emphasizing once more that “time moves both ways.” That we can move from the past to the present and the present to the past. Here we are not exploring outer space or an almost mythical world of underwater exploration, although the backwards lyrics transport us there. In “The Things I Say” we are drinking cheap wine in a poorly lit establishment, but the song still emphasizes the major themes of the album: gender, memory, time, and patriarchy.
Thank you for reading. This concludes my analysis of Divers, at least until we have the new official material from our Joanna and I can engage in some comparative study. I am conducting real life literary academic research on three of Newsom’s songs and their reception of Greek and Roman mythology that I hope to publish in a Classics journal within a year or two (but knowing how academic publishing works maybe more like... five). Until the new material is officially released and until my academic article is published, I will be quiet again indefinitely. But I promise I will see you when the new album comes out, ready to write.
—Melissa
After eleven years of being sequestered to Tumblr and in a state of sixteen-months-in-pandemic boredom, we have made an Instagram account for Blessing All the Birds (@blessingallthebirds).
Over the next few weeks, I will finish my latest series of essays on the songs on Divers in which I analyze them as chiastically-linked pairs and also, of course, insoluble binaries and refractions. So, on the new Instagram account, we want to highlight the work we have written about Divers since 2015 in the lead-up to my last posts with the song "The Things I Say," the center of the album. First, we will be sharing excerpts from BATB's first series called "Delving into Divers" which analyzed each song as collaborative scholarship and then, as mentioned, excerpts from my series simply and self-evidently called "Divers and Chiasmus."
We hope you enjoy this retrospective of sorts in a new medium! Follow the account if you please and tell all your friends who like Joanna and/or those who have enjoyed our work in the past.
Re: “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” and “Divers” and Chiasmus
A description of the series: “In this series I would like to revisit Blessing All the Birds’ analysis of Divers by highlighting the chiastic structures in songs such as “Anecdotes” and “Time, as a Symptom,” “Sapokanikan” and “Pin Light Bent,” and more, their complements and contrasts, and their symmetries and divergences. Rachel and I wrote originally song by song on Divers and now I want to bring some loose threads together while moving to the album’s center. It should, however, be noted from the outset that chiastic, seemingly aligned structures actually ricochet throughout the album and can never be truly contained to two-song units. What is more, Divers as a whole is united by paradoxical binaries (such as Life and Death) that cannot be resolved, simplified, or discerned fully through their tensions and, in fact, cannot be reduced to binaries at all…this lack of resolution, this lack of clear delineations, the wide, yet organized dispersal of themes throughout the album must always be kept in mind...I see this series served best by short essays broken down into two songs units. I might lift some language from past essays I wrote about Divers directly, adapt some of that writing, or do neither.”
We are very close to the center of the album and this is the last chiasmus before we arrive at “The Things I Say.” Previously I wrote that it felt—as we moved closer to the center—that the connections between chiastically-linked songs began to refract more and more. But for “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” and “Divers” the similarities are prominent at first glance: both songs are very conscious of the enforcement of gender roles, borders, twinning, repeating narratives, and how we remember, how we are commemorated, and by whom.
Two female narrators are left on the earth (one of the four traditional elements) at important borders (or “Great Divides” to use the words of “Waltz”) that men have already traversed to seek knowledge and/or to gain power. The narrator in “Waltz” is left on one version of planet Earth in the multiverse as men ascend through the air able to control both Time and Space. Unable to cross those borders herself, she stays put and tells us the listeners what happened to them. And the narrator in “Divers” watches on the pier as a male diver descends into the water, contemplating crossing the line between land and sea herself, frustrated by what is expected of her as a woman.
These are divides between Earth and Air and Land and Sea but also between Man and Woman, again manifesting one of the album’s central theses about gendered (im)mobility. For the narrator in “Waltz,” in particular, she is left at the border of the third and fourth dimensions like many women on the album. The vast majority—and perhaps all (if I might take that bold interpretative step)—of the characters who transcend Time (literally) on Divers are men. Furthermore, the female narrators in both these songs can comment on the consequences of transcending and thereby flattening Time, but they cannot control it themselves. In “Waltz,” the narrator reports on how the soldiers are at war with themselves and their ghosts and the “Divers” narrator knows that she is just one iteration of a woman on the shore, oppressed by gendered expectations (she could even be talking with the past versions of these women; the timelessness of patriarchy). Both narrators will witness what they witness in the song again and again: the destruction of earth, the divers seeking pearls. In both songs, there is an emphasis on interconnected, repeating cycles of time and experience.
This also demonstrates how each song is fixated on “twinning,” on repetition, on people confronting or contemplating their past selves or versions of themselves in an “eternal return and repeat.” The narrator in “Divers” becomes almost like a seat of memory for the women on the pier who came before her, of gendered expectations, of desires for more. But awareness and contemplation of this perpetual and infinite twinning effect are not active interventions into Time. It is not the creation of memory (one of the many consequences of the album’s assertion of men’s, and not women’s, connection to Time). It is not the creation of the conditions in which soldiers confront past or future or slightly different versions of themselves. Time and its temporal boundaries are slippery in these songs; we do not know what “Now” is because the narrators themselves do not have this type of control. Moreover, we are confronted with the horror of the soldiers meeting themselves in “Waltz,” but also with the horror that the woman in “Waltz” will continue to remain on the one version of Earth she has always been on, only witnessing, and with the horror that the position of the woman in “Divers” is not much different than the woman before her. Patriarchy, like much in these songs, replicates itself again and again.
Joanna Newsom has said that “Divers” is about twinning and partially about the division between man and woman, but not necessarily a binary division (a literary intention which still mystifies me to an extent; I am unable to see deeply beyond what the song says of gender). I interpreted this as a way to show that both man and woman want the knowledge of the sea, of the pearl opened up with “its single heart of white” (sexuality), crossing borders, but women cannot safely seek and receive it because of gendered systems. Are Man and Woman so dissimilar or are they made to be dissimilar? What is more, there is the menacing image of double-masted ship in the song (which I recently analyzed in a post on “Occident” and “Divers”) approaching both the man and the woman: one mast representing Life and the other Death. The cycles that both Man and Woman experience, but one which Man has the freedom to better understand and control; Woman can only comment and remember. Men are the people who cause the endless cycle of Life and Death in the multiverse through war for “Waltz.” And again, a woman is left to comment and remember and not intervene.
But this leads us to how both songs and their narrators contrast: the female character in “Divers” refuses this fate and gendered boundary. She does not want knowledge (of sexuality; of birth) as a prize for remaining on the pier: she wants to find it herself. The narrator here is resisting both notions of femininity and masculinity and Time and Space. By deciding to make such an intervention, she also decides to cross the borders of the land (the realm of women) and enter the sea, the realm of masculinity. But it is interesting that she frames this decision with a desire to become the “diver’s wife.” This declaration should not be taken literally: to me, it means becoming like the man, doing what he does, becoming a partner to his search for knowledge. It is not a romantic statement. What is even more interesting is her declaration that “never will [she] wed.” Is this a comment on how true twinning and duality between men and women can never be achieved? She wants to be his partner but cannot? They both dive, they both seek, showing the illusory nature of binaries, yet these divisions persist. This time, maybe history will not repeat itself; the narrator will hopefully change what is remembered, what is immortal. The women she remembers on the pier will not be repeated, twinned, infinite.
Audio Interview with Yve Lepkowksi, Artist and Creator of Anecdotes Tarot Deck
In recent posts, I have discussed how influential Yve Lepkowski’s Anecdotes Tarot Deck has been on my latest essays and my reentry into interpretive of Newsom’s songs after a substantial, pandemic pause in my writing here. They allowed me to access her corpus and to make connections in completely novel ways for me (as an inveterately auditory and textual processor).
With this in mind, I wanted to interview Yve, whom I have known from the Joanna Newsom fan community for a few years. I asked her about the deck, its artistic and historical context, her inspirations, and her thoughts, opinions, and interpretations of some of Joanna’s songs (along with my own). We primarily discussed “Emily,” “Monkey & Bear,” “Colleen,” “Sapokanikan,” and “Divers,” all of which make an appearance in the trump cards of the deck. Please listen to the audio of the interview here. It runs for about 45 minutes.
I have included visuals of the beautiful cards we discussed so you can follow along with the conversation more easily. This interview was recorded in non-professional conditions, with non-professional equipment, with a non-professional editor. There will be some bumps along the way as you listen. The vibe of the interview is informal and listens more like a conversation and a process of interpretation together. This is one of the rare times in which our engagement with Joanna’s corpus is not entirely textual. We hope you enjoy!
Follow-Up to Our Recent Post on “Monkey & Bear,” “Colleen,”and “Divers:” Callisto and Her Exclusion from Water
A fellow Classicist, Izzy, reblogged our latest essay on “Monkey & Bear,” “Colleen,” and “Divers” and added some commentary about “Monkey & Bear.” I wanted to post their thoughts in full here. It speaks more to the question of water and (im)mobility for one of Ursala’s mythological precedents, the nymph Callisto and the figure in Ursa Major, who is forever excluded the freedom and liberation of water that I argued Joanna Newsom’s corpus offers, explores, sometimes denies and sometimes presents to her female characters. Callisto, a victim of rape by the king of the gods, Jupiter, is excommunicated and terrorized by the female Olympians Diana and Juno after her rape. The most famous depiction of this story is found in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Callisto features heavily in my scholarship on sororophobia, a form of lateral violence among women that reproduces patriarchy, in Ovid.
i’m so underexposed to the full depth and breadth of joanna newsom analysis/criticism (and also not sure if people replying/reblogging with extra thoughts is par for the course here), so apologies if this has been covered elsewhere but this really reminds me of ovid’s take on myth of callisto, a greco-roman ursa major aetiology about a raped woman becoming a bear, then a star. i’ve always thought there was some callisto dna in monkey & bear, but this post really attuned me to the question of water and (im)mobility.
there are two crucial moments in ovid’s version of the callisto myth in metamorphoses book 2 where she’s prevented from going into water. at the center of the narrative, callisto is barred from bathing in a spring alongside her longtime companion (maybe lover?) diana because diana discovers that callisto is pregnant after jupiter has raped her. it’s a question of pollution, and specifically the kind of misogynist conception of woman’s body as polluting force that carson writes about in “women, dirt, and desire.” callisto’s pregnancy makes her literally, to the ancient mind, a source of potential pollution, but the sexual/gendered violence she’s experienced is also taken as a metaphorical pollution. diana very much enforces patriarchal restrictions on women’s mobility (jupiter, the ultimate patriarch, is her father) when she keeps callisto out of the spring.
callisto’s turned into a bear, then becomes ursa major, at which point juno, who blames callisto for the rape her husband perpetrated, arranges with various divinities of the sea to prevent callisto from ‘bathing’ in their waters as a constellation. this is apparently an explanation for why, in the classical period, ursa major’s movement in the sky never dipped under the horizon line and ‘into’ the mediterranean, but it’s framed again as a punishment on the theme pollution – its own kind of “infinite regress,” because her status as pollutant is used as a reason to keep her out of the sea, but she’ll remain polluted as long as she’s kept from bathing.
there’s also a lot going on in the callisto myth when it comes to the performance of femininity and the violent enforcement of its norms, especially given that callisto is framed as masculine in the opening of the episode. there’s an english translation here for the curious (it’s lines 406-530), although i feel like almost every translation i’ve seen really tamps down to some degree on callisto’s gender non-conformity, which is seriously marked in the latin!
“Divers,” “Colleen,” and “Monkey & Bear” (and a Collaboration with A Hopeless Endeavor Podcast)
Recently I had a whole month off from work for winter break. I had submitted all the scholarship I had been writing. I had no new classes to plan for the next semester. And, of course, since we are still somehow in this pandemic nightmare, I had nowhere to go (I have not left New York since February 2020).
I’m not great with unstructured time or a life that goes day by day without many goals or plans. People in my social circle of feminists, queers, Marxists, and more will tell me this is because I am a Capricorn (and I have to often pretend to know what that means or that I agree that our personalities are not the result of intense capitalist socialization, but rather aligned to the stars at birth). But in that unstructured time, I found the time to relax, let my mind wander, and return to some old interests like Joanna Newsom’s music and just take pleasure in the act of thinking and writing removed from my career and teaching. You have seen the fruits of some of this time, including my return to the Divers and Chiasmus series and my exploration of “Occident” and “Divers.”
I was also especially inspired to write again because I received Yve Lepowski’s Anecdotes Tarot Deck. I knew nothing about tarot and I’m an inveterately verbal and auditory processor, not a visual person, but going through the deck challenged me to make connections I have never made before even though they should have been more obvious as a long-time listener. But to be generous with myself, maybe I never had the space or the clarity to see them before (somehow that type of space is the only silver lining of this awful year). Going through the tarot deck in particular allowed me to see connections between “Monkey & Bear,” “Colleen,” and “Divers.”
I have written previously about “Colleen” and “Divers,” but bringing in “Monkey & Bear” was this moment of clarity that was amazing to happen upon and speaks to the continuity of Joanna’s understanding and exploration of gender, gender norms, and gender socialization in her corpus. I have also shared this analysis with the new Joanna Newsom podcast A Hopeless Endeavor and you can listen to—rather than read—this analysis if you want there. I have mostly typed up here more formally (with a couple of expansions, edits, and additional citations) what I spoke about somewhat off the cuff (with notes) in the recording. A Hopeless Endeavor is doing a line by line analysis of every song of Newsom’s corpus (they began with Ys and are now moving onto Have One on Me with a “Colleen” detour) and they inject a healthy dose of critical theory, philosophy, and literary allusions into their discussions. Please listen to it.
I want to start this analysis with the most recent song, since my unlocking of the other two depends on the interpretations I cultivated while listening to and analyzing Divers with Rachel in 2015. “Divers” is, in part, about a female narrator commenting on gender norms and the limitations, symbols, materiality, and enforcement of gender. The narrator is at the border of land, at the coast, and we see her looking at male pearl divers in the water, and she comments on how women cannot pearl dive, they cannot cross the border between man and sea (or therefore, seek knowledge). Women, according to the song, are rewarded with the pearls the men seek for them. Women in this universe can only be curious and there are consequences for wanting to pursue knowledge for themselves (as we see vividly in “Go Long” and its use of the traditional Bluebeard myth, as well). The characters of Colleen and Bear in the other two songs under discussion will be rewarded with finery and feminine gifts as well if they follow the rules dictated and enforced by men.
In “Divers,” there is a seemingly insurmountable division between what men and women can do. Women receive the pearls on land and men get the pearls from the water. These limitations are encoded on the very topography of the song. The border (in part) represents gender norms and expectations. The woman in the song is forbidden from entering the sea. And this relates to a broader understanding of gender on the album (and in Joanna’s corpus). In my discussions of Divers, I have spoken at length about how women are encoded as immanent and immobile. Since they are immanent or immobile, they struggle to leave from the earth and cross borders or cannot at all. Men, on the other hand, are encoded as transcendent and mobile, so they can cross borders more easily and in this case, they can enter the water. This situation—in which women stay and men move—happens again and again in “Divers.” It repeats like much on the album. It becomes systematic and cyclical in an “infinite regress.” (And it, of course, repeats in Joanna’s corpus as I will discuss below and as I discussed in my new analysis of “Occident.”)
The associations that characters and figures have with elements such as earth and water on Divers (and elsewhere in Joanna’s corpus) reminds me of the associations the ancient Greeks and Romans had with water, earth, air, and fire. Women were associated with the earth and water and man associated with air and fire. This aligns somewhat what the immanence/transcendence and immobility/mobility that I have seen throughout Divers and its comments on gender (relying on the theories of de Beauvoir and Barthes). Earth is immanent and immobile, air is the opposite. But water upsets these dichotomies and alignments. Water is not immanent and in many ways constantly moving no matter its form and seems more connected to air and fire. Of course, Joanna’s alignments do not have to correspond with antiquity.
In “Divers” water is a realm men can enter freely and it represents the freedom of movement they have and the freedom to seek knowledge from within its depths (and specifically pearls in oysters; this has read to me as sexual knowledge). Water for women can represent liberation from the oppression and restrictions they experience on land because of what men have created. Land is the realm of patriarchy, but the water can offer something else to women. And that is exactly why the female narrator in “Divers” intends to enter the water at the song’s conclusion. She defies the notion that she has to be sign, nacre “on a stone, alone, unfaceted and fine.”
When we come to “Colleen,” the selkie goes from water, crosses the border of the coast, and comes to land. As soon as she leaves from the freedom of the water, she is restricted by the patriarchal expectations of the land, just as those the narrator in “Divers” must face. In “Colleen” we see the confining socialization of the female gender in real time. She becomes immobile in many ways, most patently through the use of the corset, which is made from the “baleen” in her former home. When she crossed onto land, she become devoid of and alienated from the freedom that water represents in Joanna’s corpus. As soon as she crosses back into sea, she is again free (and even invites the listener to join her in that freedom). Although it often seems that this gendered border between land and sea cannot be breached, the narrator in “Divers” and “Colleen” achieve it. The narrator in “Divers” claims it and the selkie reclaims it by shedding the form of woman that others engendered against her will.
In “Monkey & Bear,” we are all on land from the start. We are particularly enmeshed in a rustic and agricultural setting. Agriculture is perennially associated with how man has dominated nature/the earth, and therefore, there is a perennial association of women’s body with cultivated land. (As mentioned above, the ancients believed the element of earth was feminine.) Just as they cultivate the land, men cultivate women’s bodies to produce fruit they control.
Monkey promises Bear liberation away from agriculture, but it is clear from Joanna’s corpus that women cannot find liberation on land. Throughout the narrative of the song from Ys, Bear is coerced into sex work and exploited by someone who promises to protect her. But by the end of the song, at great peril, Bear escapes the land, crosses the border of land into the sea, swims as far as she can, and finds freedom just as the two other female characters after her in “Colleen” and “Divers.” Bear removes herself from her abused body and how it was exploited because of its gender. In the water, she ascends and becomes astral (although, I admittedly always go back and forth as to whether she becomes Ursa Major or not). Water is a source of liberation again. Just as Colleen leaves the female body she receives when she first left the water and entered the land, Bear leaves the female body that Monkey exploited.
But, of course, as I mentioned in one of my original essays on “Monkey & Bear,” this liberation is conditional. Did it have to get to the point that she had to leave her own body to achieve freedom? This is still a tragedy. We cannot forget what happened to her in that body. And this is exactly why I brought up the figure of Lucretia in that same essay on “Monkey & Bear:” Lucretia does find freedom by suicide, by removing herself from her abused body, but why was that the only choice for Bear and Lucretia? Why is the only way to assert control of her life through death? Joanna the poet (I am not going to make claims about Joanna the person) does seem to believe we can transcend our bodies (evidenced most plainly in “Time, as a Symptom”) in a positive and not negative way. But I cannot forget the materiality of Bear’s pain. That will always stay with me. That is all because of gendered norms, expectations, and violence.
Now I want to return to the ancient associations between women and water and how that might inform why water is a source of liberation for the female characters in the songs. The Greeks and Romans believed that the reason women were not as capable of men intellectually is in part because they are immanent, unable to access their souls and minds because of the excess of their body’s materiality. And part of that excess of materiality was the excess of moisture in their bodies, particularly in their wombs, the site of reproduction. Women—to put it simply—were hysterical because there was just too much liquid in them! Anne Carson in 1990 wrote a compelling article on this association (”Putting Her In Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire”) and in it, we learn as well, the women were associated with water because of the permeability of water and the permeability of women’s bodies. The hallmark of women is that their bodies are vulnerable and penetrable and the hallmark of men is that their bodies are impenetrable and autonomous. There are many stories of women even turning into water (such as the nymph Arethusa who tries to escape rape by doing so) and this is a representation of the inherent permeability of their bodies. Joanna moves away from this and sees water as a source of mobility, transcendence, freedom, and knowledge for both men and women. But this can resonate with another ancient understanding of water as a realm of the earth that is unconquered, unknown, indomitable. And that is why according to ancient mythology, the sea is full of threatening, vaginal sea monsters like the Scylla and the Charybdis. Men can navigate the sea, but they cannot control it like the land. So when Colleen or Bear enter the water, they are entering a territory and a realm not under patriarchy. Colleen, interestingly, cannot reproduce or procreate on land (her plants will not grow), but she dreams of progeny in the sea. According to Anna Bennett, who wrote an excellent article for us on “Colleen,” the baby could be Colleen herself before she was engendered on land. Patriarchy is deeply affecting her sense of self and she sees herself through what is expected of her on land. When she returns to water, she can reproduce herself and find herself again. She can be renewed.
All three of these songs are concerned with the formation, confinement, and exploitation of gender on land. But all three show the failures of gender conditioning and offer water as a source of and path to liberation for women. As I recently explored, the narrator in “Occident” fears the freedom and knowledge of water and the Death it could bring (symbolized by the single-masted ship), but on “Divers,” another female narrator welcomes a double-masted ship, representing Life and Death in the water. Water and its liberation can bring Death as it did for Bear, but it also brings Life.
If I am missing any associations here between land and water, oppression and freedom for women and female figures in Joanna’s corpus, please let me know. Thanks for reading!
A whopping five years ago someone suggested to us that we compare “Occident” and “Divers” because they believed “Occident” was an important philosophical and thematic foundation for the Divers’ title song and the album as whole. And now I have come to finally fulfill a promise to write about both songs that no one is really clamoring I honor. But without this suggestion from a reader whose name I cannot find (if you are reading this, please reveal yourself to us), I would not have made this connection without them. I slept for eleven years on “Occident” and now after preparing for this essay, I love it (with an album as expansive as Newsom’s Have One on Me, I suppose that it is not surprising that I would unearth new treasures at this stage of listening).
As I discussed this song with Rachel—a co-author of Blessing All the Birds and its founder—I gained clarity around the central dilemmas in the song: Do we stay put or do move? Do we take risks or do we refuse to ever change? Do we fear the future or do we embrace it? Do we stay in the Occident (the past, its immutability, the Death it represents) or do we move to the Orient (the future, its mutability, and the Birth it represents)? The narrator comments on this as she imagines her family (or as she says “kin”) moving away; as she struggles to move forward in a relationship and with her simultaneous fear of Death; as she worries she lives only in a memory “with sound turned down low;” as she worries “the universe [is becoming] loose;” as she wonders whether she will miss the opportunity to truly live and love; and as she wonders whether to leave the shore to which she runs but does not cross. Towards the end of the song, the narrator stands at the border of land and water, unwilling to move forward, and awaits the arrival of a single-mast ship, who she fears will take away someone she loves and which Rachel acutely suggested signifies and is Death. A literal bearer of absence and symbolically the absence of immortality. An absence that can also come suddenly like the “the sting of a bee.” Overall, in “Occident,” the narrator contemplates if Love will be enough to save her, her family, and her partner from Death, although she knows as well that their demise is inevitable. And that very question is central to the entire album of Divers. If she moves forward in her relationship, in love, as Rachel told me, “she will have to accept Death.” Or in other words, said by another Newsom narrator: “Love is not a symptom of Time; Time is just a symptom of Love.”
The image of the woman in “Occident” immobile on the seashore brings us forward to a similar image on “Divers.” But this time the woman cannot, or feels compelled not to, leave the shore and enter the water because of gender expectations and the enforcement of its roles (“I know we must abide / Each by the rules that bind us here / The divers and the sailors and the women on the pier”). In this universe, women stay at the shore, on the land, men go into the water, searching for the (sexual) knowledge of pearls, of Life and Death (“Divers” has much more interest in Birth and the roles in which we are seemingly born than “Occident”). As we have often discussed on this blog, in Divers, women represent immobility, immanence, and stability and men represent mobility, transcendence, and progress (according to De Beauvoir and Barthes’ theories on literary and philosophical representations of gender). This dichotomy also has geographical ramifications: women are (on) land and men are (in) water.
The narrator in “Divers,” whom we find on the shore, yearns to do what a man in her universe does: find the pearls, cross borders, enter the water, understand. In “Divers” the narrator by deeply desiring to enter the water and leave the shore, differentiates herself from the narrator in “Occident,” who only wishes to stay on the shore, not to cross a border, and for her love to do the same (“Well darling I can't go/ But you may stay/ Here with me”). In fact the “Divers” narrator dreams of what finding the knowledge in the pearls and the water could mean for her. She welcomes the knowledge of both Birth and Death into her life. She determines to enter the water and become the “wife” of the diver (although she will not “wed”), his partner in the pursuit of knowledge. The narrator in “Divers” ultimately exonerates men for creating these patriarchal conditions and hopes these divisions and lack of access to knowledge can be bridged.
What is more, like the narrator in “Occident,” The “Divers” narrator sees a ship coming towards her, but this time the ship is double-masted, representing Life and Death, as Rachel additionally suggested to me in our correspondence, but it also evokes for me Man and Woman, another essential doubling in the song and the mission for knowledge she believes Man and Woman should both take. The narrator in “Divers” invites this ship to come and does not fear its double masts. In fact, this narrator has accepted Love into her life (the male diver in question) and seems to have accepted this and loved him in many different iterations of life (she is one woman of many experiencing this same role; “I ain't saying that I loved you first / But I loved you best”). But, of course, the double-masted ship is not necessarily a wholly positive force, it is “bull tearing down the coast.” This is an image which conveys the violence and celerity of both Life and Death and echoes the “matador who baits the kin” of the “Occident” narrator, or who baits them to go down other paths in life or draw her loved ones forward to cross the border she refuses to traverse.
The narrator in the “Occident” is planted firmly in the ground, although the border brings her dangerously close to a liminal state, a path forward, a Life that inevitably leads to Death, a time where she has “no skin.” The future and change are coming but she cannot, or finds it impossible to, embrace it and leave the shore, cross the border, get on the ship, although she will still die on the shore even if she refuses to embark on that maritime journey. But, on the other hand, the narrator in “Divers” demands change and looks to traverse what can be the dangerous line between the land and water. She sees the West “as an ancient border” representing the past, a sword onto which we must fall, or Death (“And in an infinite backslide / Ancient border, sink past the West / Like a sword at the bearer's fall”). “Divers,” at least as far as I can tell, does not mention the East specifically, but, in contrast to “Occident,” I would like to envision the narrator sees the West, the Past behind her and looks towards the East, towards the Future. With such an image before us, one question remains paramount: which narrator will we emulate when faced with such a border?
*Before I go, I would also like to thank my good friends Cristina Ferrandez and Ena Markovic who helped me process this song in our group chat about many things big and small, including Joanna Newsom.
As I wrote in my initial post about the chiastic structure series on Divers, there would come a time—especially as we move to the heart of the album—when the resonances between the seemingly chiastically connected songs would become harder to delineate (although, of course, all these songs resonate with one another in important ways that move the listeners backwards, forwards, chiastically, and more). I knew this analytical framework and path was never going to be as clean and circular as I would have liked, but it did challenge me to look at the songs in a way that felt more appropriate than the linear framework and path we first took on the blog in the “Delving into Divers” series.
“Same Old Man” at first blush seems drawn more to the themes and imagery of “Sapokanikan” and “Leaving the City” with their explorations of the many iterations of New York City history and experience, their migration from the capital U-rban New York City to somewhere else, to home, to the rural. What is more, the song foregrounds the confrontation with the soul and death we will experience in “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive.” “Same Old Man,” like “Leaving the City,” also shares concerns with the passing of seasons and how the seasons manifest the omnipresence and cyclicality of death. While “Goose Eggs,” on the other hand, continues the themes of war, flight, and migration that we see in “Anecdotes,” “Sapokanikan,” and “Leaving the City” and helps to lay the foundation for the literal war between Time and Space we see in “Waltz” and a relationship and its flaws that could repeat again and again.
But, with that being said and as always on this wonderful album, the songs in question indeed reflect, refract, compliment, and complicate one another. (You can find my and Rachel’s thoughts on “Goose Eggs” and “Same Old Man” from the “Delving into Divers” series in which we spent more time on the explication and interpretation of their structures and narratives. These posts are more about highlighting shared resonances, imagery, and themes in a shorter format.)
Both “Same Old Man” and “Goose Eggs” are concerned with repetitions (which can be said, of course, about the entire album of Divers). The former concerns the repeated iterations of this song by different singers (“Same Old Man” is traditional and Karen Dalton’s version is the most influential one for Joanna according to her interviews about its inclusion); the repeated experiences one and many have in New York (seeing the same old woman hanging their laundry day after day); the accumulation of similar experiences that millions have in one concentrated place (the narrator is one of many in New York seeing an old woman hanging their laundry); the repetition of the seasons (autumn in particular); and even the repetitive motions of a windmill to which the narrator arrives at the end of the song after they have left New York.
“Goose Eggs,” which has a more rococo, traditional sound (another connection with “Same Old Man”) concerns the repetitive migrations of geese, the many repetitions of war in our lives (one of the characters has to take on a something he “cannot refuse” and there is reference to military plane formations), and the repeated mistakes we make in relationships, especially when we cannot confront them and truly “redact” them. The repetition of mistakes in “Goose Eggs” made me think that New York is the repeated mistake of many who move there but then eventually leave for somewhere else or return home, as we see in “Same Old Man” and “Leaving The City.”
“Same Old Man” presents New York as immortal, able to “continue on alone” (just like in “Sapokanikan” and its rumination on the palimpsestic memories of New York) while the narrator is not and fears impending death and its symbols like autumn. The narrator asks a leaf that has turned to brown and died to turn back to green and to return to life. Although, in contrast, the question itself about the city’s immortality and its accumulation of experiences and the people asking that very question is a repeated, almost immortal experience that Joanna Newsom continues herself. This song, this album, and Joanna are part of a perennial process of renewal through art.
New York is always the city in Divers from which people leave (“Sapokanikan,” “Leaving the City,” “Pin Light Bent,” and “Same Old Man”), but can you really ever leave it? Does it consume your experiences, bury them, excavate them, resurrect them? If Joanna Newsom consistently sings of New York and immortalizes the stories and memories there of her own life and of her album’s characters, did she ever leave? Can she ever leave? Is her experience there only temporary? And Karen Dalton, who was “redacted” (to use the word from “Goose Eggs”) often from musical history (even from Newsom’s own liner notes from Divers, which still disturbs me (is a feminist statement or erasure?) and who rarely was able to speak of her own art before she died in 1994, has been resurrected because of Joanna and will continue to repeat after her.
“Goose Eggs” additionally asks if we are always driven towards love, death, memory, and “Same Old Man” asks if we are always driven to return home, to return to our memories and our past, especially when we are in pain and growing old (“My mind is fading and my body grows weak...”). There is also imagery in both songs manifesting the past of older ways of production: the windmill and the kiln and coal. In “Goose Eggs” the fire and the kiln makes literal coals and also more abstract coals of a relationship that has failed and did not produce something desired, maybe a child.
Furthermore, the movements that each song contains are similar. In “Same Old Man” we move from the city to the countryside and from the past to the present, represented by the windmill. In “Goose Eggs” there is constant reference of movement to East to West (for the characters, for planes, geese, although that is more North to South), which maps onto the movement of the present to the past (the rising sun in the East and the setting sun in the West). Something else “Same Old Man” has often made me ask: when we move from the East to the West, from the present New York and its constancy in time to the past and memory, do we accept our own death? As we make that move, as we do in “Leaving The City,” do we confront death and our fears of it? In “Goose Eggs” we see those fears of death, represented in a romantic relationship that cannot last, as “thin as eggshells.”
In many ways, I wonder if the entire album itself can be said to move from East to West and then from West to East from “Anecdotes” and “Time, As a Symptom.” We begin in the morning on “Anecdotes” with the cooing of the morning dove and we return back to it by the end of “Time, as a Symptom.” Do we move from the rising to the setting sun and then back? Do we begin with life in “Anecdotes” and then come to a contemplation of its end and then begin the process all over again, looping back to the beginning of the album? All movements on Divers come to some kind of end, but it is only a matter of time before they will be resurrected and repeat again.
Re: “Leaving The City” and “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive and Chiasmus”
Returning to “Leaving the City,” after reading my initial response, appears very much necessary. I listened to the song and read the lyrics the other day and I finally understood it, or rather finally was grasping less at straws. After assiduously working on interpreting “You Will Take My Heart Alive”—“LTC’s” chiastic counterpart—the meaning of the song became much more manifest. Although I did not endeavor to do so over four years ago, there are benefits to always considering the songs on Divers with their pairs, their counterparts. They clarify, they amplify, they reflect, and refract one another.
“LTC” starts off with a seemingly mundane scene: the narrator is moving away from the city (New York, the Ur city) we find in the song before. But as Divers is wont to do, a simple scene opens up to a wider philosophical rumination of mortality and death. Unlike in “Sapokanikan’s” urban environment, nature, agriculture, and the four seasons are apparent and naked to the eye. The narrator’s walks us through the fields, the cycles of agriculture and our lives, down a road that inexorably leads us to our fate.
The four seasons, prominent in “LTC,” dictate agricultural cycles. But in the song, those same four seasons evoke the four periods of our lives, as well: birth and infancy, adolescence and younger adulthood, middle age, and old age and death. The narrator asks how we will occupy that time. What will we do with the time we are allotted? Do we seek fame, reputation, renown like those we encountered in “Sapokanikan?” Do we dawdle and hesitate with the limited time we have, “slow ourselves to a trot?” These concerns for fame themselves are cyclical, like the fields to be cultivated and the seasons in their ineluctable transitions, as they occur again and again in nearly every culture.
What is more, the narrator encounters the Death of December, the winter that has come, but spring, with her nourishing, rejuvenating lights saves her and the narrator, at the end of the song, longs to submit to her allotment (“And that is all I want here/ To draw my gaunt spirit to bow/ Beneath what I am allowed”). The seasons (Horae) are traditionally women in Greco-Roman mythology, although Time (Kronos) is male. But here Death becomes a woman, as well, when she is male in the same traditions. But, in an album invested in the femininity of immanence, that decision maybe does not come as a surprise.
When we arrive to “YWNTMHA” the narrator, seemingly talking to their own soul, takes on a bird’s eye view of nature and civilization (“the line of the sea...the capillaries glowing with cars”), the same view in “A Pin Light Bent” through which another character who dies sees. The narrator sees the paths that allow us to transition from one land, one desire, one life to the next. Here, compared to “LTC,” the narrator is not looking at what lies ahead almost laterally, but what has already happened, “what they were allowed” as they “counted towards the end.” They are encountering the last transition in life, the one to death, when they and their soul fear the body and mind duality, the hard binary that kills us. The mortality we all experience, the December of Death, “the silent constant driver” has come to claim her prey (maybe the prey she spared when Spring rescued earlier narrator in “LTC”). But, as the last song of Divers maintains, our permanence on earth comes from our heart, the connections we have made with others while we were alive. Yes, the narrator knows “it must end,” but that does not mean they will succumb to full erasure of their time on earth. They declare: “you will not take my heart alive.” Death will not take their memories, their effects on others, the beating heart that radiated its warmth to others. Is that something the narrator will be “allowed”? Is that something that we will all be allowed?
Re: “Sapokanikan” and “A Pin Light Bent” and Chiasmus
As predicted, it took me a year to get back to my new series about chiasmus in Divers’ structure that highlights connections and also significant contradictions between the album’s bookended songs. (More and more over this immense span of self-isolation we have all been experiencing, I have realized that the economy and time—to use the parlance of the many memes proliferating our social media accounts—are just not as real as we believe.)
Now when I have more and more time to use, I want to analyze “Sapokanikan” and “Pin Light Bent” more as connected, but diverging, units and highlight how they reflect and refract one another. Here is what I intend to do with this series in general (and again forgive if there are massive gaps in when I write):
I would like to tighten up our analysis of Blessing All the Birds analysis of Divers by highlighting the chiastic structures in songs such as “Anecdotes” and “Time, as a Symptom,” “Sapokanikan” and “Pin Light Bent,” and more, their complements and contrasts, their symmetries and divergences. Rachel and I wrote originally song by song on Divers and now I want to bring some loose threads together while moving inward to the album’s center. It should, however, be noted from the outset that chiastic, seemingly aligned structures actually ricochet throughout the album and can never be truly contained to two-song units. What is more, Divers as a whole is united by paradoxical binaries (such as Life and Death) that cannot be resolved, simplified, or discerned fully through their tensions and, in fact, cannot be reduced to binaries at all...this lack of resolution, this lack of clear delineations, the wide, yet organized dispersal of themes throughout the album must always be kept in mind...I [moreover] see this series served best by short essays broken down into two songs units...
I have written on the connections between “Sapokanikan” and “A Pin Light Bent” extensively here and these two songs are the two I explicitly aligned previously in our “Delving into Divers” series, but I want to bring together a couple of more threads before our next chiasmus cycle.
Both songs reference poems and grapple with how memory are formed, particularly how memory is formed in order to protect power and the status quo. In “Sapokanikan,” the narrators references many a monument for dead, white men which sit above the colonized land of the indigenous people, whom white Europeans displaced, murdered, and invisibilized. The song begins by referencing the chiastic and dueling “Ozymandias” poems by Percy Shelley and Horace Smith which recount ruins in Egypt white Europeans use to moralize on their lives. And “Pin Light Bent” references a James Dickey poem called “Falling” about a flight attendant who dies after she fell from a plane in 1962. As I said in my earlier essay about “Pin Light Bent:” “Joanna reclaims and repurposes these poems as she creates her own canon, her own history and memory of her philosophies, lyrics, music, interests during a period of time. They are artifacts of knowledge, art, memory, and history that she revives and remembers.” Francoise de Moriere was a real woman who died while she was working, whom the original poem by Dickey renders nameless. As does Joanna. A question I had in my initial essay was whether Joanna is reflecting the sad reality of erasure or perpetuating it? Art forms our memory and makes some immortal, but it can also be one of the many culprits in creating false, unjust narratives about the past. The contrast between the named man, John Purroy Mitchel, who ascends and then falls in his own airplane, and the nameless woman has upset me for years. Perhaps that is the point. Why does Mitchel become a monumentalized hero and de Moriere becomes a sexualized body at the hands of a male poet? (When de Moriere in the earlier poem is on ground, she is naked and becomes “one” with the earth.)
In “Sapokanikan,” we begin on the earth, actually below the earth of the city of New York, and then we move up into the air with John Purroy Mitchel before we descend again. In “A Pin Light Bent” we begin in the air and follow de Moriere as she descends to the ground and contemplates the thin barriers between life and death along the way. In the end, we always return to the immanent, to the feminine, to Death. And the Big Question of Divers is whether that immanence prevents transcendence into another life, into immortality beyond art. (Or is art the only immortality?) But as Mitchel returns to the feminine, his name is remembered and de Moriere’s is erased. She is erased like the Lenape, Florrey Walker, the prisoners, poor, and enslaved buried under Washington Square Park. At what do we look and despair? ...Hopefully all the erasure.
Re: “Anecdotes,” “Time, as a Symptom,” and Chiasmus
This year, as mentioned in my previous post about Louise Glück’s Averno and its illuminations of Divers, has been one of most trying in my life, so trying that I have rarely even had the time to listen to Joanna or to write. But there were some bright spots this summer and I listened to Divers from beginning to end while feeling the winds blow and the waves break. It made me realize that I wanted to do so much more with this material. I am so proud of all Rachel and I did together to analyze the album. But I always wanted to tighten up our analysis by highlighting the chiastic structures in songs such as “Anecdotes” and “Time, as a Symptom,” “Sapokanikan” and “Pin Light Bent,” and more, their complements and contrasts, their symmetries and divergences. We wrote originally song by song and now I want to bring some loose threads together while moving inward to the album’s center.
It should, however, be noted from the outset that chiastic, seemingly aligned structures actually ricochet throughout the album and can never be truly contained to two-song units. What is more, Divers as a whole is united by paradoxical binaries (such as Life and Death) that cannot be resolved, simplified, or discerned fully through their tensions and, in fact, cannot be reduced to binaries at all. Life and Death appear to be binaries, but as we are born, we begin to die. These binaries in Divers exist in constant state of restlessness; they exist at the same time and leave a sort of permanent stasis in their wake. We live. We die. We are living and dying simultaneously.
With what I write over the next weeks (?), months (?), years (?), time moving both ways (?) about chiastic structures throughout Divers, this lack of resolution, this lack of clear delineations, the wide, yet organized dispersal of themes throughout the album must always be kept in mind.
I see this project as best served by short essays on each song unit, beginning with “Anecdotes” and “Time, as a Symptom [TAAS]” in an attempt to bring clarity to my understanding of them (in tandem) and yours, but it is impossible to limit the analysis to the two-song units and other songs will always find their ways in. I might lift some language from past essays I wrote about Divers directly, adapt some of that writing, or do neither.
In “Anecdotes,” we begin with a narrator, a comrade of Rufous Nightjar, who has transcended Time in his war. (Nightjar in this war asks “When are you from?”) The listeners find ourselves in the transcendent realm of Man, of war, and of the attempts to overcome mortality through such immortal acts of violence.* The narrator transcends Time and Space in the air, but others plant landmines to return soldiers to Death, to the earth, to material. Here, we return from the sky to the ground, we descend from the ascent. By the end of the song (at some point in time), the narrator, leaving transcendence, rushes, tears, and speeds back the domestic world, to femininity, to the immanent realm of Woman. He embraces a return to the family, to people for whom “the dew must dry,” for whom there is no “temporal infidelity.” He returns to earth from his flight, from the transcendence (of time) to the immanence (of mortality) because he must see the family “before the sun [life] is gone.” This roots Divers in an exploration of Death and how we react to, try to escape, and care for that loss of ourselves and others.
“TAAS” reverses the exploration of transcendence and immanence that we first see in “Anecdotes.” “TAAS” opens with a female narrator and we are firmly situated in realm of Woman by seeing the reaction to a birth, the beginning of all immanence (not only for women). The song ends with a plea (from a narrator who cannot transcend Time herself because of her gender, her attachment to materiality) to those who can conquer Time, such as Rufous Nightjar, to help sustain her joy, her inheritance to her child and to those she loves, that what she made material can be preserved and nourished by immateriality.
Throughout the song, we see the narrative shift from the earth to the heavens, while in “Anecdotes” we move in the opposite direction, another reversal of its sister song. Many songs in Divers move from the earth to the sky, from the sky to the earth. We can see that “Anecdotes” as it moves from the sky to the earth is connected to “Sapokanikan” and “Pin Light Bent” and “TAAS” as it moves from earth to sky is connected to “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive” and “101st Lightbourne Elite.” In “TAAS,” we, furthermore, are able to see why the narrator in “Anecdotes” rushes home. He wants to experience the “nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating joy of life” with his family, too. That means more to him than transcending Time in the ways of Man, of war, of violence. The mother in “TAAS” never wants the “dew to dry,” she wants “no end” for her love. She invokes the album’s birds, Rufous Nightjar, the Lightbourne Elite, Jesus, and the Greek gods to feel assured that “time moves both ways,” that “temporal infidelity is possible,” that love can survive and bring peace to ourselves and loved ones, even if we are materially absent. We can live, we can die, we can be dead and can continue to live all at once.
By having “TAAS” flow into “Anecdotes,” Joanna’s album suggests that we must, like “Anecdotes’” narrator, cultivate that joy while we still live. Even more boldly, it suggests such transcendence of materiality through love is possible. Joanna explores this same notion in “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive,” the first song she wrote for Divers and the seat of its philosophies. Death cannot destroy the narrator’s heart. Her heart (and all its emotional and interpersonal connotations) will persist despite her death. The narrator of all these songs may be mortal, but their emotions and the impressions they have made on others are not. “TAAS” at the end of Divers (an end that enters directly into its beginning) eulogizes the persistence of love and the connections its makes with others in the face of Death and its aftermath. Through them, we live.
*Throughout the series on Divers I analyzed the album’s exploration of the binaries of Man/Masculinity and Woman/Femininity and how that also translates it to the differences and tensions between Time and Space and transcendence (immortality, immateriality) and immanence (mortality, materiality). This binary, which always crumbles under its false and insoluble weight and under further inspection, is rooted in ancient understandings of gender and a lot of twentieth-century critical theory. You can see more about this leitmotif here.
—Melissa
Recently I finished reading Averno by Louise Glück, an astounding collection of poems inspired by the myth of Persephone, Hades, and Demeter. This, like most pieces of myth, is one with many avenues of meaning. One common path of interpretation is to read this myth at its surface level, as the story of Persephone’s abduction and rape by Hades, the god of Death (as a scholar of sexualized violence in Greek and Roman antiquity, this is my usual way into the myth). But many see the myth more metaphorically: it becomes the story of a young woman and the mother she left behind learning to cope with the monumental transition of Death (and relatedly, Death marks a sexual transition, as Persephone the maiden died and becomes a married woman and a Freudian psychosexual transition, the end of the relationship with our first intimacy with our Mother). But Glück in in her poetry appropriates the myth differently, presenting another version of Persephone—one who does not merely accept Death and the Life she left behind, but one who welcomes it precisely because Death may offer even less pain than existence.
With the ancient Greek myth as a prism for exploration, reflection, and understanding, Glück’s narrator asks the readers and herself what will happen when we, too, encounter the God of Death in the like Persephone (as Glück writes: “What will you do when it is your turn in the field with the god?”) Will we accept or even embrace Death? Will we dread it? Will we miss the opportunity to live because we are so paralyzed by its approach? Will we realize that Death is maybe not any worse than Birth and Life, which endow us with violence and pain? Will we see Death as a solution to the Pain of Birth (to quote Newsom here)? Overall, although Persephone can achieve this powerful, welcoming relationship with Death, the narrator in Averno who interprets her myth, cannot. She trades the pain of Life for the pain of Death. She welcomes neither Life nor Death, but, feeble, can do nothing to stop their progressive sufferings.
Glück’s narrator, moreover, throughout Averno maps her anxieties and questions about Death onto nature, onto the cycles of fields and the seasons, but we are reminded in several poems that nature does not approach this relentless cycle of Birth and Death with fear, with a “warehouse of memory.” We can create and consume art to sublimate these memories, these predictions, these fears of the pain Birth and Death bring, but nature continues on; whatever we project upon it and whatever it experiences matters little. We may lament a burned and scorched field (a recurring image in Averno), touting it as a symbol for what we now experience and what is to come, but the field grows back—differently, silently—despite what we feel and what we fear. The burned land lost the farmer a year, but what is that to the field?
All of this, of course, reminded me of themes found throughout Newsom’s corpus, especially on Divers and especially in the songs “Time, as a Symptom [TAAS]” and “Make Hay.” As we have explored, these songs ask many of the same questions with many of the same kinds of natural and agricultural imagery. They even allude to and negate one another specifically with the lyrics “If there was a way to reckon love/ except as a symptom of time?” and “Love is not a symptom of Time: Time is just a symptom of love.” But “TAAS” approaches Death with a guarded optimism, a hopeful plea, and an ending promise about achieving immortality through our love and relationships with others that “Make Hay” and Glück, as well, in Averno, tonally and thematically never want to approach.
“TAAS” posits (in part) that although we die, we do not die without a purpose, alone, with nothing to give, because we lived and created joy with others and we can in fact continue to live (immaterially) through the joy we left behind. The song begins with a mother looking at her child for the first time: the seat and continuation of her joy and life, although of course that joy is suffused with the fear that Birth and Death are hardly separate and cannot be unique ends of a binary, Glück’s same fear. “Make Hay,” on the other hand, posits (in part) that Death can be a solitary, abrupt, and material experience and we may leave nothing behind, stewing for years in our anxiety and bereavement about a purposeless, aimless life. Death in “Make Hay” is also something we do not accept or certainly do not welcome, but grieve and fear and misunderstand.
The differences between these songs’ dominant perspectives can be clearly seen through their use of agricultural imagery. In “TAAS,” there is reference to Demeter and Persephone and their maintenance of their mystery cult which promised eternal life (“a single ear of corn”). The song’s use of the Greek myth with the return of the daughter, Persephone, to her mother, Demeter, from the realm of Death, suggests that even if Death may not be escaped fully, it can be transcended. “Make Hay’s” agricultural references (especially “We sow and we reap, again”) never allude to the Greek myth and the hope it can bring to the dying and their loved ones, but only suggest the ineluctability of permanent Death and our lack of control over and understanding of that inexorable process (“How was I to know…it was before our time…”). It focuses on the painfully powerless time before and after the deaths of loved ones, not on immortality.
Averno helped me to clarify the divergent approaches about Life and Death in Divers (one which hopefully suggests permanence and purpose and the other more cynically denying it). I want to particularly share one excerpt from the poem “October” that starkly contrasted with “TAAS” but deepened my understanding of “Make Hay” (and this is one excerpt of many that echoed Joanna; admittedly everything always comes back to her corpus for me since it is the North Star for whatever I am reading):
The light has changed;
middle C is tuned darker now.
And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed. —
This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: you will not be spared.
The songs have changed; the unspeakable
has entered them.
This is the light of autumn, not the light that says
I am reborn.
Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered.
This is the present, an allegory of waste.
So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:
the ideal burns in you like a fever.
Or not like a fever, like a second heart.
The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.
They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.
They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.
And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly
in anticipation of silence.
The ear gets used to them.
The eye gets used to disappearances.
You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.
A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;
it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.
How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.
Maestro, doloroso:
This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.
Please feel free to read this book and talk to me about it. I am not claiming that Averno (published in 2006) is a direct influence on Joanna, but it surely can help us to illuminate her work. Many other similarities between Divers and Averno exist: they fixate on thresholds and borders, they both tackle the simultaneity and circularity of time (especially through natural and agricultural imagery) and there is a leitmotif throughout Averno of the soul, disassociated from the body, speaking the to narrator, a divide that drives the conflict in “You Will Not Take My Heart Alive.” Glück made me want to return analyzing Joanna’s poetry again after the second hardest year of my life (a year so bad I did not even have the emotional and intellectual energy to listen to any her albums more than once) and before Joanna returns to the stage in less than a month (I see her three times in New York in September with friends from near and far). Although I know from the events of this past year that I will never welcome Death with open arms like Glück’s Persephone or see joy in Life as a solace for Death like Joanna’s narrator in “TAAS,” these pieces of poetry have helped me to reflect on my anxieties and fears, happily, even for a bit.
Delving into Divers: “Make Hay” (or the song outside the loop)
Melissa:
I am still amazed we did it, but this is our last song in the “Delving into Divers” series. I have no idea what will happen next on Blessing All the Birds, but Rachel and I started this series because of how deeply Divers affected us, because we wanted to collaborate more as writers, and it gave us a project that could sustain long-term analysis of an album worthy of so much more than we can offer it. We have changed so much, as women, as teachers, as learners, as writers since we first began in Fall 2015, and we intended to finish this so much sooner than we did. But that is a testament to so much of what Divers is saying: the inexorable passage of time, how time is both not long and so long, and how we inhabit different versions of ourselves along the way. If several years from now I have a moment of worthlessness and ask myself “What did I make?” at least I can say that Rachel and I made this project, an intellectual friendship born and nourished by a shared passion. (Of course, a question like “What did I make?” in a song from one of the greatest songwriters, musicians, and thinkers alive will always make me feel wistful, aimless, and regretfully unimportant no matter the knowledge of my own achievements.)
Analyzing “Make Hay” has been difficult. I was preparing some thoughts on it one morning three weeks ago after not listening to it for so long. It affected me. I cried. I thought about the future death of my mother, from whose death I know I will never fully recover because she made me. And then later that day I found out that an old friend of mine had died tragically and far too young and alone, to whom I never got to say “so long.” We had lost touch for many reasons, but “Make Hay,” “Time, as a Symptom” and so many others songs on Divers reminded me of what a permanent joy she created in the lives of others, which I cannot guarantee to make immortal as “Time, as a Symptom” urges us, although I will try my hardest. Like the narrator in “Make Hay” impending death always makes us contemplate our own lives, our own births, and our own effects on others. Death is a reality because we can feel it within us and we can see it all around us. As we feel death, as we see it, we try to resist it for ourselves and hope we can defeat it for others, but in the end we must accept that “we’ve got no say,” even if we long to evade it, even if we continue to create life and reap the fields, knowing that birth creates death. We know all this, but it still creates perennial confusion and disappointment. We constantly ask, like the narrator, “how was I to know?” How are we to truly know and accept that we die, that our loved ones die, and that there is nothing to do about it? What is more, we offer our death as a source of sustenance to the vultures above us, who rely on our material deaths to sustain their own lives and communities (And as an aside, the presence of the vultures instead of nightjars here in “May Hay” says to me how much more pessimistic this song is than “Time, as a Symptom,” although they are literarily and cosmically connected.)
Death also forces us to reckon with how we can create immortality, despite mortality. Did we have a purpose while we lived? What did we make? Will people remember us by our “rattling nib?” How can we create meaning in our lives through the materialization of ourselves? How do we live after death? More fundamentally, it makes us contemplate those who created us and maybe even the first act of creation. In the song, the narrator moves from the creation of the universe, of humankind (and its sin), and of the narrator herself (“Where wind made the dust, sin make the snake, and mama made us”) and we briefly experience the trajectory of time itself, how the life of the narrator is a blip in a larger sequence, we experience how we what we make is dwarfed by more consequential creations. (But since we are human, is there anything more important than the creation our own mothers gave us?)
One question remains that I want to address about “Make Hay:” where does it belong in the album? When Divers was released, I knew about the cut song from interviews with Joanna. I believed then and still that “Anecdotes” and “Time, as a Symptom” created a closed loop for us to contemplate many of the questions about time, life, and death I asked above. Many fans, too, believe the loop is closed and that the release of “Make Hay” did not break the loop. But “Make Hay” helps us to more deeply inspect and interrogate what is within the loop, particularly connecting us to “Time, as a Symptom” with its own contemplation of birth, mothers, agriculture, the paradox of living while we die and dying while we are living. It also helps us back to earlier songs like “Only Skin” (with its “So long! And humming a threshing song until the night is over”) that illuminated similar subjects to Divers with similar (agricultural and otherwise) imagery. The “before our time” aspect to the song further solidifies the song’s position outside of the loop. “Before our time” not only signifies that we all die before we should, that there is never enough time, that countless others have endured the joys and indignities of life and death before us, that our deaths have been determined before we life. It is also signifies that the song is possibly “before” Divers. A prelude, so to speak. It allows us to ruminate over the important questions with which we will grapple later on in the album—and in our lives.
Rachel:
I’m deeply moved by your take on “Make Hay,” Melissa. How beautifully you have captured what the song says about death and life and our desire to leave something, anything, as a reminder of our brief existence here. When this song was released, I did not listen to it for so long. Everyone seemed to love it immediately, and quickly proclaim it as one of her best. I didn’t feel that on first listen. It took me much longer to appreciate the various textures of it and to accept it as part of the album. I don’t see it, still, as part of the album, but as a loose thread at the fraying edge of the tightly constructed and contained Divers loop. It serves as a trailing connection to the death that sat at the heart of Ys and bridges the time between those albums (and yet, doesn’t?), connecting them through imagery and subject matter. It is the memories of that time and those feelings that, though felt most intensely years ago, live on.
Perhaps connected to this, the intro of the song, with its bleak, repeating chord always made me deeply anxious. It is jarring. Combined with the high-pitched, mournful call of “so long,” it struck too close to the heart. The song moves through so many moods, though: shimmering trills of memory, joyful, skipping melodies through the “old times” of friendship and youth, and then stark, bare, longing questions cast into the sky, which is at once the pink-hued sky of dusk and the threatening, suffocating one of stormy summer nights.
With its layers upon layers of imagery, the song interrupts the time of Divers. It takes us out of the air-y, water-y, amorphous temporal space of the rest of the album, where time cannot be trusted, and plants us deeply back into the earth. The song contextualizes the album in its sense of groundedness. As Melissa noted, the only bird in this song is the buzzard—connected so deeply with death and the process of decomposition. The buzzard acts as an usher between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It literally eats recently living bodies, now dead, and returns them to the earth. It does not dive. It does not soar. It circles and it waits for death. We too (the tillers) await death. We make our death daily in the act of living. How we were to know that all moments lived in our lives were passing towards death? Did we do enough to make sure that it was worth it? Did we make something worth leaving behind us? Did we dot all our I’s/eyes and cross all our T’s/teasels?
The agricultural imagery in the song is, like a crop at harvest time, endlessly abundant. The narrator crams as much in as she can, sometimes losing breath and skipping through complicated word chains, almost as if she is desperate to add just one more thought, just one more shred of tangible, earth-based evidence of her existence. There is a tension in the song between these constructed lines (lines of lyrics written on the page, lines tilled in a field, moments of time passing in a line, the crosses of t’s) and the natural cycles of nature/time, imagined here as the circling buzzards and the circle of family and friends who surround the dying body of “old friend.” In the end, through the passing of seasons and time, our straight lines become circles/cycles. We cannot escape it. We sow and we reap again.
It makes sense to me, that this song was cut from the album and that many see it as outside of the Divers time loop. This is a song that fights against the time loop, and it is bleak. It is so, so bleak. While Divers itself is a damn sad album, it is, in the end, transcendent. We find joy at the end. “Make Hay” does not feel that way. It feels like a resignation, like a return to the “cold clay” reality of death as a potential ending and a realization that creating something that lives on (“Mama made us/ But what did I make?”) is also the creation of more death.
I’m still uncomfortable with this song. I still don’t listen to it often. I still think that it is beautiful and difficult and painful and somehow serves to connect Divers to Ys, Have One on Me and even Milk Eyed Mender, so I see this song as a vastly important one in Joanna’s catalogue.
Melissa:
Thank you for your analysis of this song, Rachel (and of course, for writing this series with me). I agree about the jarring bleakness of “Make Hay” and its almost frank physicality. It is blunt in ways that are almost unexpected from Joanna and that makes it (and me) all the bleaker.
Whenever I listen to this song, I can feel the words tumbling out of her mouth and her fingers moving on the keys, which makes the loss of physical materiality discussed in the song more palpable. But my discomfort with the song and your own should not discount, as you mentioned, its importance to understanding Joanna as a whole. Your last paragraph shows that although we have essentially written a book on Divers (!), how the loop of our analysis must be left open, especially in connection with other parts of Joanna’s corpus.
We will need a break—for sure—but rest assured, dear readers and friends: we will connect more of her earlier corpus to Divers at some point in time. Ys as a whole, especially “Emily,” for me feels like an important bridge, “Colleen,” “Occident,” and more. For now, fellow delvers: “so long!”
Friends and readers, we are now at our second to last song in the series, “Delving into Divers.” I will talk about this more when we analyze “Make Hay,” but this has been quite a journey (for both me and Rachel).
So much time has passed and so much has changed in my life since we began that every time I start to write again on Divers, I am reminded of how swift “the river of time” truly is. (“Time, as a Symptom” has made me maudlin.)
—Melissa
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MELISSA:
“TAAS” has always interested me, from my very first listen to Divers. It has helped me to face and poetically analyze—although not yet conquer (an impossible task)—my fears of death and how those fears are rooted in the people I will lose upon my death. Unlike most Joanna Newsom songs, I understood this song almost immediately because it mirrored something internal, which I often externalize to those I love: mortality is not only your physical death, but the death of your experience of your emotional and spiritual intimacy with others. As the narrator of this song states, we care about the passage of time because we are one person in a nexus of others: “love is a not a symptom of time, time is a symptom of love.”
The philosophical core of this song, however, insists that although we die, our relationships with others, the joy from those relationships, and the effects we have on others are in fact immortal, they cycle and ricochet through time itself, transcending physical mortality. Death cannot erase all that preceded, all the joy you had and made in others. There is a “repeating” joy in life that reverberates even after we have gone. That joy, like birth itself, is generative, alive, vital. But birth itself can be “cruel debasement.” It is a experience that not only brings intense bodily pain to our maker, but first introduces us to pain of death itself. As we breathe, we also die, time always moving tensely in both directions. And although we are always dying as we breathe life into our lungs, the severance of our lives from their joys is also cruel.
The song begins with the imagery of a mother after she looks upon her child because birth itself illuminates the painful and dichotomous anxiety with which we must always live: once born, we are forced into facing our mortality. We then cling desperately and greedily to life and also hope for immortality because of all the happiness life bears for us. As we live, we die, and we really do not want to die. Beginning with the birth imagery also calls to mind a tension I have explored throughout Divers in our series: the conflict of transcendence and immanence and thus, masculinity and femininity. Birth and death equalize both men and women via immanence, although men have a closer relationship with transcendence because of their control of culture, discourse, art, and relationships. Although men might want to dispel inevitable bodily immanence through transcendence, everyone’s portals into life and out of life are feminine spaces we all must leave and enter. All people, even men, first leave the body of women and lastly enter the earth, the figurative woman. Femininity is the beginning and ending of time as we know it. As Claudia Dey argued in her recent piece in the Paris Review, “mothers are the makers [of birth and] death.” And again, there is a connection between Newsom’s work and my academic research into the Roman poet Ovid, who routinely presents death as a feminized experience and depicts violent women and mothers whose fulsome femininity embodies death.
“TAAS,” moreover, reverses the exploration of transcendence and immanence that we first see in “Anecdotes” (once again reflecting the chiastic structure of the album and the close connections between “Anecdotes” and “TAAS” in particular). In “Anecdotes” we begin with Rufus traversing time itself, waging war with men, making an impact on civilization, but the narration ends in the familial and domestic space, the stationary, the realm of women. On the other hand,“TAAS” opens with a birth and ends with a plea (from a narrator who cannot transcend time herself because of her gender, her immanence) to those who can conquer time to help sustain her joy, “transmit” her message, many of whom are characters we have already encountered in stories of Divers: the gods, Rufus Nightjar from “Anecdotes,” the white ship upon which the men of Lightbourne Elite defy time and space. And Rufus received the message. He makes war, he travels through time, creates immortality through his time outside of feminized spaces, but he also finds joy in his family (and fears time and his accomplishments within it because of his intimacy with others.)
And because I am a classicist by trade, I cannot omit the song’s references to the story of Demeter and Persephone, the former the goddess of grain and the latter, her daughter. Persephone is abducted and raped by the god Hades and brought to the underworld. Her mother greatly mourns her absence, jeopardizing all of humanity with death in the process as she deprives them of the sustenance of agriculture through famine. But through much sorrow, she ultimately meets her daughter again after her resurrection from death. Persephone is one of many resurrection figures who later inspired the mythology around the cult of Christ, who is also mentioned in “TAAS” (“a cave, a grave, a day”). The stalk of grain (a symbol of the Eleusinian mysteries which ancients entered in order to have a closer relationship with the goddesses and thus, a better afterlife when many perceived the afterlife as suffering), Aerion (Demeter’s horse), and Rharian (fields near the temple of Demeter at Eleusis) all make an appearance in the song’s final moments. Many others have noticed these references (including Becky Varley-Winter and Ann Powers), but these ultimately help to elucidate the philosophical heart of the song: Demeter believed she had lost her “joy of life” to death, her defining relationship of love, she mourned that loss greatly, but in fact, that joy is immortal and does not die. Persephone (or joy) returned, quite alive.
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RACHEL:
I first want to say, Melissa, that this piece is stunning and I cannot hope to add anything as beautiful as what you have written here. Second, it has been almost three years now since Divers was released and I cannot fully capture how much has changed during that time. Especially in this past year, Time has felt so ephemeral, the world has felt so unreal. It isn’t the same world that Divers was born into and I am certainly not the same person that first listened to this song.
Birth is a forgetting, as is Death. The cruelty of life is that we cannot remember, though we try, in art and story and song, to cling to this Earth and these memories and this specific Time. We forget, in the moment we are born, the lives we have lived before. At Death, we are forgotten, despite our best efforts. Time moves and flows both ways and we must stand brave, understand our place within it. This place. This time. All places. All time. Birth and death are not so separate it seems.
The birth at the beginning of “TAAS” is almost certainly this type of birthdeath, as it was the “hardest thing she’d ever do”. It is a mother coming face to face with the birth of her child, her own rebirth as a mother, and the death of herself before motherhood. Motherhood is inextricably linked to both the world of the living and the world of the dead, and therefore, Time itself.
In loving, we face Time. We face Death. We face the ending and beginning and the forgetting. When we love, we understand at once that we have endings and, yet, through love we ensure endless beginnings. This is the joy that lives on.
In “Emily”, Joanna sings along a similar line that we are all, in our lives, embodiments of “Joy/ Landlocked/ In bodies that don't keep.” “TAAS” is a repudiation of this line. It is an admission that though our bodies don’t keep, joy is certainly not landlocked. It is transcendent, eternal, immortal. The song is, more importantly, a final rejection of the world of binaries that Divers has explored so thoroughly. It is a reminder that birth/death, man/woman, land/sea, the City/the Garden and more are all equalized by Time, which is symptom of the original dust of our universe, Love (or Joy).
We have come to the point in our nearly two-and-a-half-year “Delving into Divers” series where I am seeing the songs more clearly, where I see them as more enmeshed and interconnected entities than ever before. I see many echoes in “A Pin Light Bent” of the dichotomies and tensions that have already manifested and been explored. This song once again contemplates borders and boundaries, those between the land and the water, cities (especially New York) and nature, the sky and the earth, life and death (and in other songs such as “Waltz” and “Divers” we additionally see ruminations over the borders and boundaries between time and space, man and woman). The song once more emphasizes flying in the air above the ground and objects falling through the air returning to earth (although the birds we see populating the album elsewhere are absent). The connections between “Sapokanikan” and “A Pin Light Bent” in particular are what struck me the most as I began to more seriously analyze this song in preparation for my essay on this song (they have, indeed, always fascinated me, although I have not been as systematic about the other chiastic structures in Divers).
Our narrator in “A Pin Light Bent” is in a plane contemplating their own mortality and their eventual passage beyond the “common fence” separating life and death. But the narrator also considers the death of Francoise de Moriere, who is the center of James L. Dickey’s poem “Falling” and who, while working as a “poor flight attendant” fell to her death from a plane in 1962, just as John Purroy Mitchel in “Sapokanikan” experienced in 1918. Both Mitchel and de Moriere are unwilling divers moving between the borders of air and earth and life and death simultaneously. Two years ago (!) in my analysis of “Sapokanikan” I suggested that both Mitchel and de Moriere experience very literal (and physical) tragic arcs. We see that they are at an apex (in the air) and in a reversal of fate, they crash fatally to a nadir (on the ground). A straight line from life to death. The man falls as a result of an hamartia, a hubristic mistake (Mitchel did not wear a seatbelt while flying) and the woman falls as a result of an accident out of her control (the plane door opened), both “tragic” in Greek definition of the word. One figure falls as he strives to be remembered as heroic and the other falls while she is at work on a presumably mundane day (which to me reads as a very gendered division). Both Mitchel and de Moriere are immortalized after death through artistic monuments (textual for John and Francoise and physical for John), blurring the boundaries between mortality and immortality, impermanence and permanence that Newsom’s narrators in Divers continually encounter.
What is more, “Sapokanikan” and “A Pin Light Bent” allude to earlier poetry (both versions of “Ozymandias” by Percy Shelly and Horace Smith for the former and as mentioned, “Falling” for the latter) and are grounded in an analysis of and elaboration on the themes of those poems. They both grapple with how and why we remember all that has fallen and died, how and why we gaze upon and create memory and history. Joanna reclaims and repurposes these poems as she creates her own canon, her own history and memory of her philosophies, lyrics, music, interests during a period of time. They are artifacts of knowledge, art, memory, and history that she revives and remembers.
With Dickey’s “Falling,” Newsom’s (poetic) narrator changes the tenor of the poem in important ways. We still see, as in Dickey’s work, de Moriere falling and contemplating her descent to death and the world below her, but Newsom’s narrator, unlike Dickey, refuses to sexualize her death. Dickey envisions de Moriere undressing and then seeking a sexual union and marriage with the soil into which she falls, naked for the farmers who find her to gaze upon her. Newsom’s narrator rather emphasizes the philosophical thoughts of such a fatal descent. The narrator finds a similar inspiration to Dickey (what are the final thoughts of someone facing a strange and inevitable death?) and challenges it. She honors the thoughts of a woman about to die with metaphysical concerns. While researching “Falling” I came across a quote from Mary Ellman about Dickey’s depiction of de Moriere that I think best synthesizes the overall gender politics of the poem: “[the poem] mourns a vagina rather than a person crashing to the ground.”
However, both Newsom’s narrator and Dickey never name Francoise de Moriere, she is the “flight attendant,” similarly participating in the objectification of a woman who once lived and who was erased both by the sensationalist media around her death and by artists reacting to it. This namelessness has bothered me since the release of the song. Divers often comments on women lost in male works of art. The mother and daughter, Florrey Walker, now Francoise de Moriere. “Sapokanikan” critiques the “hand of the [patriarchal] master” that can create history or enforce obsolescence. In Divers’ second song, there is a clear pattern to who undergoes obsolescence: the Lenape, women, prisoners, the poor. All in all, the marginalized struggle to be remembered because of explicit and even violent forces of white, male power. They are objects to be silenced, not people who make history. But by not naming de Moriere, what is Joanna saying? Does she perpetuate the erasure and objectification of women? Does she strip Francoise de Moriere of the power of being named? Is she, with her own authorial power, intentionally burying someone, wielding a power similar to the ones critiqued in “Sapokanikan”? Out of the named people and characters on Divers, the majority are men. [Furthermore, the liner notes to Divers do not even make mention of how Karen Dalton’s version of “Same Old Man” was most influential on Newsom. Dalton is another unnamed artifact of Newsom’s art.]
Or is de Moriere’s (and other women’s) namelessness a reflection of reality? A reflection of the reality that women face in art, in history, in memory? I had to search for de Moriere’s name when first looking into this poem although Dickey’s name was everywhere. De Moriere is nameless in most of the critiques and reviews of the Dickey’s work. Something that has always been wonderful about “Sapokanikan” for me is that is it very clear about how memory and history are not accidentally, but intentionally created by certain privileged classes of people to legitimize their own supremacy and to ensure the continued marginalization of the downtrodden. de Moriere may have fallen out of a plane accidentally, but Dickey, a man writing in the 1960s, intentionally remembered her in a belittling and dehumanizing way. So when she (and other women) are not named in songs by Joanna Newsom, what does that mean for how Divers grapples with gender? If we believe that this namelessness is a reflection of the reality of women and how they are remembered, we must ask if is it best—or even wise—to use the master’s tools of erasure and objectification to critique the master’s house? Or am I being too charitable to the feminist politics of this song? Do we have yet again a beautiful (I never said otherwise about Dickey’s “Falling” and “A Pin Light Bent”) and yet imperfect monument to Francoise? Can we exonerate the enforced namelessness of de Moriere?
Rachel:
“A Pin Light Bent” is one of my favorite songs on Divers. I don’t, however, fully understand it. I think about it a lot. Melissa has already explored the connection to the Dickey poem, so I don’t plan to spend too much time there. I’m more interested, actually, in the way this song incorporates the ideas of light, reflection and mirroring as they relate to the greater existential and philosophical questions of the album.
I see the song separated into two halves. The first half is mostly concerned with the falling narrative. The second starts to confront light and its role in a universe built on duality and opposites. Light is, to me, life source power, and it is very fluid in this song. It “comes and goes”, like waves moving back and forth, pulled (importantly, I think) by the moon. Light/life travels through the barriers of the world in the act of falling. It passes sky, ocean, city, garden. It sees them all, yet is disconnected. The separation is key. In a world of opposites and dualism, light/life is heavily controlled, contained and manipulated. The image of the honeycomb city is one of my very favorites on the whole album because it speaks so much to the disconnection and separation that torments the album. It is trapped in “strange homes” - “intersected and enclosed”, “anelectric and alone”. It intersects, yet is hopelessly disconnected; opposites rub up against each other, but never produce the spark of electricity. It is passive. Tragic.
The lyrics are pretty explicit in describing the barrier as a “common fence”. The common fence is the universe built on dualism. It can represent life/death, light/dark, soul/body, time/space - any of the dualisms that are explored on the album elsewhere. I think it is interesting to notice Joanna’s vocal choice in this part of the song. The line about the “common fence” begins as a reassurance, but descends into menace as Joanna’s voice becomes more powerful. “The Great Light” is, after all, absolutely terrifying, and we get to see but a minute portion of its power, siphoned through a pinhole in the barrier(s) that separate(s) us from knowing the universe.
The second last verse is one of Joanna’s most overtly philosophical and it almost reads as a visual diagram of her treatise. The light trick that Joanna describes here, through the image of the amora obscura is a beautifully contained metaphor for the place of Self and Love in the Universe. That which we call “Self” is only a pale fragment of the “Great Light” and that which we call “Love” is a false perception of “Self”. We think that the person we love is part of us, part of the “Self”, but this is a trick. The person we love is a false reflection of ourselves. They are in fact, an inverted image of our “Self”—an opposite that relies on the manipulation of light/life in order to exist.
The image of the amora obscura always brings to mind this quote I see floating around various Joanna communities. I’m not even sure where the quote is from or whether it is misattributed (anyone know?), but apparently Joanna once said, “It broke my heart when I learned the moon had been passing off the sun’s light as its own.” This quote helps me understand the light play and the tragedy of Pin Light Bent. “Self” is just a tiny piece of the “Great Light”, passing off its existence as its own. And “Love”? “Love” is just a trick of the light, a false reflection of the stolen/borrowed light that we call “Self”, inverted on a mirror.
“A Pin Light Bent” is, for me, a song full of resignation and understanding. It skirts the edges of nihilism. In the last lines, the narrator admits that their life is essentially meaningless—just a trick of the light—completely passive. Yet, there is defiance, too. The narrator takes ownership of the tiny light they are permitted. It is theirs, even if just lent. Furthermore, the pin light of their life is bent*. It navigates between opposites, confronts barriers and changes course. It is active, not passive. However miniscule the sliver of Great Light that we attempt to pass off as our own, it is ours to do with it what we will. We do not need to be confined by walls and fences, seas and land. We move, like bending light through them.
*in my tiny understanding of the way light bends, it happens when light passes between two different materials/substances (i.e., between opposites).
Melissa:
Thank you, Rachel, for this interpretation of the song!
Not only did you write about the use of light in Divers, which you wanted to do from the beginning of the series, you addressed the second half of the song and its metaphysics, which I mostly avoided. (Admittedly, my response to “A Pin Light Bent” is in many respects about what the song does not say.)
I sympathize with the lack of understanding of this song (and of the album). My understanding is nowhere near the “Great Light” level, but instead is merely a refracted thin beam of understanding, a metaphor not only for our time on earth, but my own knowledge of Joanna Newsom’s art. “It’s a pin light, bent.”
Finally, I agree, too about the nihilistic tone of the song. At least at this point in my understanding, “A Pin Light Bent” contrasts greatly with the last song on the album— “Time, as a Symptom,” which I ultimately believe is a hopeful song that does not explore falling from, but rather transcending to the light.
"Kingfisher lie with the lion:” Arthurian threads in Joanna Newsom's 'Kingfisher' and Ys
[Melissa’s editorial note: It has been a long while since Rachel and I have published a guest author, but our friend Cristina Calatayud Ferrández wrote an amazing, brilliant, academic essay on a song we have never discussed before on Blessing All the Birds: “Kingfisher” from Have One on Me.
Please take the time to read about Arthurian mythology, the Mists of Avalon, gender, Ys, and fate a few weeks before we publish our essay on “Pin Light Bent” in our “Delving into Divers” series.]
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Eight years after the publication of Joanna Newsom’s triple album Have One On Me, ‘Kingfisher’ remains one of the most elusive and enigmatic songs of her career.
Compared to the majority of songs on the record, at first glance ‘Kingfisher’ doesn’t appear to fit into the narrative as smoothly. Here is an album exploring the downfall of the relationship between a man and a woman; a woman expressing her unconditional love (‘Easy’), the trials and tribulations of making a doomed relationship work (‘Good Intentions Paving Company’), the anger at having been used and abused by the man she loved (‘Go Long’) and, finally, her resignation to letting go (‘Does Not Suffice’). It seems like a perfectly self-enclosed narrative, one that explores the ups and downs, the complexity, the love and the anger that any profound relationship experiences during its downfall. But in the midst of all this, how does ‘Kingfisher’ fit in?
The answer, it would appear, is in the very title. At the crux of the song lie the major themes explored in the Fisher King legend, and further developed in Arthurian mythology. And particularly in the novel that inspired the title of Ys; The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. In these, we find some of the themes explored in the album, but at an epic scale: the relationship between women and men, allegorically represented by the conflict between Christianity and paganism; the idea of a fertility that is tied to the land and the kingdom; and the inescapable and self-fulfilling prophecy that is Fate, with its archetypal re-rendering of History.
In exploring the Christian-pagan conflict, Newsom also continues a tradition of Christian imagery in her wider discography; most notably in ‘Emily’, with its references to the Eucharist (“Take this/Eat this”) and to God (“Loving him/We move within his borders”), and in ‘’81’, where she ponders the possibility of innocence and new beginnings in her relationship with her lover (“I found a little plot of land/In the Garden of Eden”).
I. The lines are fading in my kingdom: The Fisher King legend
The Fisher King legend first appears in Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval, and is a well-known tale within Arthurian mythology. Other versions of the legend include Eschenbach’s Parzival and Malory’s Le morte d’Arthur.
In the legend, we find a Christian king whose infertility, caused by a wound to the genitals from a pagan lance, leads his kingdom to wasteland and immerses it into a period of enchantment. It is only once a worthy Saviour, on a quest to find the Holy Grail, utters the right words at the right time, that the king can be healed and the kingdom restored.
This idea of a king’s fertility being tied to that of his land forms the basis for all Arthurian mythology. King Arthur himself is unable to father children, a fact that is paralleled by the decline of his kingdom and his ultimate inability to maintain peace between Christians and pagans.
In the Fisher King legend, it is only through a process of disenchantment that the Saviour can restore the kingdom. Interestingly, the members of the kingdom all know what the rules of the enchantment are: “They know what the curse is and how it works, but they can’t dispel it. The only way the enchantment can be broken is by some naive person doing the thing that has to be done unintentionally, out of his true nature” *** Therefore, the Grail hero’s role is simply to bring light to the situation, not to resolve it.
In this way, the Fisher King legend seems to point to the idea that when people live in a manner that is not worthy or true, they are living in a wasteland. Even while being aware of what’s causing their kingdom to lay to waste, they are unable to truly see it and to take action.
In Have One On Me, we see this represented by a relationship that is slowly wasting away, while its members refuse to acknowledge what is so blatantly obvious (in ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ Newsom sings: “And the tilt of this strange nation/And the will to remain for the duration/Waving the flag/Feeling it drag”).
And just like the Fisher King legend, themes of fertility abound and are inextricably linked to the demise of the relationship; songs like ‘Baby Birch’ and ‘On A Good Day’ speak of a lost baby and of paths that can no longer be taken, pointing to the possibility that this lost child represented a future that is now out of their grasp. Just as the narrator closes the door on Baby Birch, so the path that she had envisioned with her lover is also closed.
What’s really interesting about Newsom’s take on the fall of this relationship is that it is so tied to notions of what it is to be a Woman who, through love, suffers the violence of a Man. Love, fertility and wasteland are all tied together by the conflict of men who don’t own their violence, and the tensions between Man and Woman that this patriarchal dynamic creates are the very thing that brings the kingdom to waste. In ‘Kingfisher’, all of these themes explored in the album reach their culmination and are brought together, represented allegorically through the conflict between Christianity (coded male) and paganism (coded female).
II. The damnable bell: The myth of Ys
In an interview with Erik Davis for Arthur Magazine, Newsom reveals how she arrived at the title of Ys:
Newsom also finally got around to reading the fantasy novel on her nightstand, which happened to be her best friend’s favorite book. She thought the novel might be cheesy, but she loved it. And one night, there it was: a passage about a seaside castle that had been raised “by the magic of the ancient folk of Ys.”***
This passage is from The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, the celebrated feminist fantasy retelling of Arthurian mythology. The Mists of Avalon was published in 1983 and made a mark due to its sharp focus on the women of Arthurian mythology, and particularly its positive portrayal of Morgaine (Morgan le Fay), in sharp contrast to the majority of retellings that depict her as an evil sorceress. In the novel, Morgaine is a heroine who is fighting to save her pagan heritage from obscurity. The novel also focuses on other women from both sides, such as Gwenhwyfar (Guinevere), Viviane (The Lady of the Lake), Igraine and Morgause.
The novel’s impact on Newsom seems to have been extensive; we find references to it throughout Ys (“that damnable bell” in ‘Sawdust Diamonds’ is a direct quote from the Mists) and, years later, in ‘Kingfisher’, whose medieval affectations and cryptic lyrics seem to abound with references to this mythology.
What’s very significant about the Mists is its shift to the women, coded pagan. The conflict between Christian and pagan characters becomes much less clear-cut, and the author decides to focus on the consequences of a shift from a more matriarchal (pagan) religion to an extremely patriarchal (Christian) one.
Both the Arthurian legends narrated in the Mists, and the Breton folklore surrounding Ys, can be considered variants of the original Fisher King myth, with the conflict between Christianity and paganism and themes of fertility strongly at their core.
Like Lough Neagh in Ireland and Lyonesse in Cornwall, the myth of Ys follows a tradition of cities sunk into the sea due to the sins of their inhabitants. Again, these stories are narrated from a moralist point of view, where Christianity is seen as the morally correct religion, and paganism a sinful practice: “The Celtic legends of the wicked cities tend all to emphasise how paganism and sin is drowned by the stronger power of the Christian gods, with water always being the purifying agent”.*** In the case of Ys, we see a conflict between the patriarchal pious father and the sinful daughter who takes to lovers at night. Keen to let one of her lovers in through the gate that holds the water at bay, she steals the key from her father, and thus causes the city to become flooded and sunk. Only her father is able to escape mounting a horse. The city, and the pagan practices therein, are forever lost under the water.
In the Arthur Magazine interview with Newsom, Davis adds:
As Newsom read more deeply into the legend, things got a little spookier. … Newsom saw so many parallels between this story and her own that it freaked her out. There were the themes of decadence and excess, of fathers and daughters and boundaries burst. … Then Newsom stumbled across the clincher: according to Breton folklore, on calm days along the coast you can hear the sunken bell of the cathedral of Ys, tolling evermore.***
III. I’m afraid of the Big Return: The Mists of Avalon
Ys is only mentioned in passing a few times in The Mists of Avalon, but its significance is considerable due to the common themes running across them. The most notable passage takes place in a dream that is felt as a memory. Igraine, King Arthur’s future mother, dreams of standing in Stonehenge with Uther Pendragon, her husband-to-be:
She stood on a great plain, where a ring of stones stood in a great circle, just touched by the rising light of dawn ... To the west, where stood the lost lands of Lyonnesse and Ys and the great isle of Atlas-Alamesios, or Atlantis, the forgotten kingdom of the sea. There, indeed, had been the great fire, where the mountain had blown apart, and in a single night, a hundred thousand men and women and little children had perished. … Igraine looked up, without surprise, at the blue-cloaked figure by her side, and although his face was very different, and he wore a strange high headdress crowned with serpent, and golden serpents about his arms – torques or bracelets – his eyes were the eyes of Uther Pendragon.***
This dream passage lays the foundations for what will become one of the major themes of the novel: the conflict between Christianity and paganism. Indeed, Igraine and Uther can be thought of as archetypes for King Arthur and Morgaine (his sister), and in turn embodiments of the Fisher King legend. Across the narratives of all these characters lies this very conflict, and the ensuing wasteland caused by the lack of resolution and enduring triumph of the patriarchal order.
Interestingly, within the mythology of the Avalon novels, Igraine and Uther are considered reincarnations of Micail and Tiriki, two characters who in Ancestors of Avalon, set thousands of years earlier, escape from the sinking Atlantis, in a narrative very close to that of the Ys myth. This aspect highlights the cyclical nature of the novels, narratives and archetypes within. Again and again, history repeats itself and the patriarchy is sustained.
Within the above passage there is also an undercurrent of Fate tying together these characters. We are led to believe that they have been soul mates since the dawn of time. And we viscerally feel the ominous air of inevitability that the entire novel is bathed in. Of course, the notion of an inescapable Fate, particularly one that ties a woman to a particular man, is problematic; it implies that women cannot escape History and that they are forever bound to make the same mistakes and end up in the same situations of oppression within the patriarchal order.
The idea of Fate and the inability to escape it is very much present in Have One On Me too. In ‘No Provenance’, Newsom sings: “I’m afraid of the Big Return”. In ‘Baby Birch’, the narrator worries about her baby, begging for someone to keep an eye on her, because she would “hate to see her make the same mistakes”. She is anxious that her own daughter will be unable to escape the destined paths that she herself was committed to.
Then again, in ‘Ribbon Bows’, the narrator proclaims that “I do reserve the right/To repeat all my same mistakes”, implying that her choices are, nevertheless, her own, and possibly (hopefully) seeing a way out of the cycle of Fate by owning her own decisions. There is a radical self-compassion lying therein, one that the narrator gradually gains throughout the record. When, at the end, in ‘Does Not Suffice’, she finally leaves, she proclaims that “easy I was not”, in a direct reversal of a fate that, in ‘Easy’, seemed completely inescapable (“But one can't carry the weight/Or change the fate of two/I've been waiting for a break/How long's it gonna take?/Let me love you”).
IV. Bearing the pall: The Mists of Avalon
All this brings us back to ‘Kingfisher’. Theories abound as to the obscure meaning of the song, but it is my personal theory that the lyrics are a direct reference to The Mists of Avalon, narrated from the perspective of Igraine, who speaks to her fated lover Uther. I base this theory on the fact that Joanna has directly referenced the novel, and specifically a passage narrated by Igraine. I also base it on the abundance of themes and symbolism in the song which are highly relevant to the novel and to Arthurian mythology as a whole.
In the song, Newsom ties together the legend of the Fisher King, manifested through the characters of Uther and Igraine and their future son Arthur; the theme of the wasteland that the conflict between Christianity and paganism brings; and the wheels of Fate that connect the lovers in the song. These three elements, in turn, allegorically represent the demise of the relationship between the two lovers in Have One On Me: the inherent conflict between Man and Woman within the context of oppression in the patriarchy; the demise of a relationship that cannot be sustained within this very system of oppression; and the binding to and escape from a history that attempts to repeat itself.
The Mists of Avalon depicts two lands at odds with each other: Britain and Avalon. While Britain continues to usher into the future ways of Christianity brought by Roman conquest, Avalon gradually recedes into the mists of oblivion, where the old ways of the Great Goddess continue to be practised.
In this ominous climate, the keepers of the old ways struggle to maintain the influence of their religion, and to prevent it from falling into obscurity. This task is carried out mainly by Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, and Taliesin, the Merlin of Britain. It is them who foresee that, in order for paganism to be saved, they must ensure that Igraine and Uther are married and bear a child.
At the time Igraine is married to a Duke, Gorlois, whom she has a daughter with, Morgaine. During a trip to London, Igraine finally meets Uther and it is then that she has the dream from the above passage. The dream persuades her that she must go along with Viviane’s and Taliesin’s plans to ensure Gorlois is killed, so that she can marry Uther. She knows that Uther and her are tied together by Fate, and that they must be together.
Viviane’s and Taliesin’s plans, however, go much farther. As they have foreseen, Uther is the key to ensuring that paganism can continue to coexist alongside Christianity in Britain. Uther is the nephew of the Roman High King of Britain, Ambrosius Aurelianus, and therefore expected to succeed him in the throne. Yet Uther himself has not a drop of Roman blood and is loyal to the old pagan ways, proving so to Viviane by undergoing the rites of the sacred marriage.
The rites of the sacred marriage are pagan rites that tie the King to his land. During the rites, the King, representing the Horned God, and a pagan priestess representing the Great Goddess, have sex, symbolically joining King and Land in a vow of marriage. It is the King’s way of declaring that he is committed to the old ways. In her dream, when Igraine sees serpents tattooed around Uther’s wrists, these are marks that he has carried out the rites of the sacred marriage. When she next sees him in Tintagel, after he arrives to kill Gorlois and claim her as his wife, the serpent tattoos are there too, revealing that he, like his archetypal ancestor, has undergone the rites. Serpents are common symbols in Great Goddess mythology and worshipped as guardians of her mysteries of birth and regeneration.***
In ‘Kingfisher’, Newsom sings “Whose is the hand that I will hold?/Whose is the face I will see?/Whose is the name that I will call/When I am called to meet thee?” So the song begins by acknowledging the Fate that ties the narrator and her lover together. She knows him (“thee”) as her timeless lover, but she wonders who he will be in this life.
The song abounds with references to this life, as opposed to past ones (“In this new life where did you crouch”), as well as to serpents (“your gut was a serpent coiling”), pointing to the pagan heritage of her lover. The narrator also asks him about his participation in the sacred marriage rites (“And for the sake of that pit of snakes/For whom did you allay your shyness?/And spend all your mercy and madness and grace/In a day beneath the bending cypress”).
Uther’s assurances as to his commitment to paganism serve to consolidate his support for the old ways, and thus for the world that Igraine, who comes from a family of pagans and is sister to Viviane, represents. Despite the oppression that Igraine, being passed from man to man within the context of Christianity, suffers, she can still have faith that her husband and King will preserve the old pagan ways that provide sexual freedom and independence to her sex. That the isle of Avalon, where Goddess worshippers live in freedom, choosing their own lovers and their own rites, will endure. That her daughter Morgaine, who is a pagan priestess herself and chooses her own lovers, will continue to enjoy that freedom, in sharp contrast to Gwenhwyfar, Arthur’s wife, a devout Christian who is simply passed from father to husband.
During the song, the narrator distinguishes between her previous husband, Gorlois, and Uther. She describes Gorlois as a man “With a heavy lip and a steady hand”, illustrating the patriarchal stance that he, like a good Christian, took in their marriage. She goes on to describe Gorlois’ love “Like a little child loves a little lamb”, portraying the Christian morals of the union as childish and condescending.
In contrast, Uther is loved in a fateful passionate way. Since the times of Atlantis she has loved him, and their souls are inextricably tied together. She reminisces about that past life where they loved each other, and how it all ended with the fall of the city, describing an apocalyptic scene: “Hung from the underbelly of the earth/While the stars skid away below/Gormless and brakeless, gravel-loose/Falling silent as gavels in the snow”.
But as key as Uther is to the future of paganism, he is not actually the “promised” king. The main purpose of the union between Igraine and Uther, instead, is for her to bear a child, King Arthur, who it is believed will succeed in maintaining the old pagan ways and ensuring they can coexist alongside Christian ones. And indeed, like his father, King Arthur will undergo the rites of the sacred marriage and attempt, but ultimately fail, to preserve paganism. And Arthur’s sister Morgaine, just like her mother, will bear the weight of this failure as she watches her heritage, beliefs and freedom fade away.
In the end, Viviane and Taliesin are proven wrong; both father and son will back away from their vows to make everything necessary to prevent the Christian patriarchal order from being fully established; Uther eventually becomes distrustful of Avalon and sees it as counterproductive to fight for it when he believes Britain will soon be all Christian; Arthur, on the other hand, is persuaded by his devout wife Gwenhwyfar to reject the ways of Avalon and become fully Christian. Ultimately, both men are simply not troubled enough to fight against a system of oppression that actually favours them.
So when the narrator of ‘Kingfisher’ sings “I can bear a lot but not that pall”, the meaning of bear is threefold; she cannot bear the betrayal that will end the old matriarchal ways and fully submit her to a culture of oppression, just like she cannot literally bear the child who will bring about such an order. At the same time, she cannot endure to be the pall-bearer of the kingdom whose demise she is about to bring by conceiving Arthur.
In the final section of the song, the narrator makes a case for paganism and accuses her lover of betraying her. With a slowing-down “And in naming, rise above time/As it, flashing, passes…” the song enters the bridge. Here, a timeslip takes them to their past: the arrival of their pagan ancestors to Atlantis (“We came by the boatload”), their old pagan ways (“Worshipping volcanoes/Charting the loping skies”) and their ultimate demise in the fires that led the city to ash and to sink beneath the waves (“The tides of the earth left/Us bound and calcified and made as/Obstinate as obsidian/Unmoving, save our eyes”), something that is symbolically happening at the present time. The narrator finally demands to know whose side her lover is really on (“To whose authority/Do you consign your soul”?).
As the final lines lead to the climax of the song, she accuses her lover of metaphorically betraying and murdering her (“I had a dream you came to me/Saying, you shall not do me harm anymore/And with your knife you evicted my life”), thereby fulfilling the cyclical prophecy leading their kingdom to fall. She describes this scene as a “birdbath”, making allusion to the titular “King-Fisher” (or kingfisher, ironically an ancient symbol of peace and prosperity).
Just like the cyclical nature of History so, she pronounces, “the day we are born/We commence with our dying”. The ominous air of demise that began in ‘Easy’ is now coming to a close with the collapse of the relationship. As we enter the next and final song of the album, ‘Does Not Suffice’, the cycle is ending and a new one is about to begin.
V. Escaping Fate
‘Kingfisher’ remains one of Joanna Newsom’s most epic songs in its broach of major themes of patriarchy, oppression, love and betrayal that are very much present in our society and within the smaller scope of personal relationships. In the context of Have One On Me, the song’s grounding on mythological motifs and archetypes helps dig into the essence of these themes, and to find answers and patterns in the ways women and men coexist.
Most importantly the song, and the album as a whole, serve Newsom to address and escape certain master narratives that are pervasive in Western societies: namely narratives of betrayal of men towards women, and of being unable to escape the oppression that our patriarchal society proffers men.
Indeed, Newsom’s foray into mythology allows us to explore male-female power dynamics within their wider societal context. Marie Louise von Franz argues that “In myths or legends … we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through an overlay of cultural material”. In contrast, “in fairy tales there is much less specific conscious material, and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly”.*** This helps explain why songs like ‘Kingfisher’ feel epic in their scale and address of patriarchal dynamics, whereas others like ‘Go Long’, inspired by the Bluebeard fairy tale, feel much more personal and targeted at a particular man.
In The Mists of Avalon, these master narratives are depicted as historical and cyclical through Fate. And yet Newsom has reason to be “afraid of the Big Return”, as such repeating narratives do nothing but continue to uphold the oppressive dynamics of male-female relationships. Fate is no excuse for the perseverance of toxic relationships, and our narrator manages, at the end, to break away from these cycles, boldly choosing to leave in ‘Does Not Suffice’.
As she packs her pretty dresses and bids her lover sweet farewell, she leaves only to venture into a new land; call it Ys or Avalon. The lines of her kingdom will be drawn only by herself.
***Campbell, J. (2015). Romance of the Grail: the magic and mystery of Arthurian myth (E. L. Smith, Ed.). Novato, CA: New World Library.
***Davis, E. (2006, December 23). “Nearer the Heart of Things: Erik Davis profiles JOANNA NEWSOM.” Retrieved January 13, 2018, from https://arthurmag.com/2006/12/23/nearer-the-heart-of-things-erik-davis-on-joanna-newsom-from-arthur-no-25winter-02006/
*** Pouliquen, J. (2007, October 23). “Legends of Drowned Cities.” Retrieved January 13, 2018, from https://www.celticcountries.com/traditions/42-legends-of-drowned-cities
***Davis (cited above)
***Bradley, M. Z. (2001). The Mists of Avalon. New York: Ballantine Pub. Group, 27.
***Davidson, H. R. (2006). Myths and symbols in pagan Europe: early Scandinavian and Celtic religions. Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press.
***Franz, M. V. (1996). The interpretation of fairy tales. Boston: Shambhala.
