Crack in the Wall

This is the first track off of Vega's album, Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles; it was released in 2014 (shortly before I began this blog).

The song has a very interesting rhyme scheme. For the first two verses, it's a b c b c c d b (as long as we rhyme "sun" with "ravine" and "scene"). Then the last verse is longer; it starts the same but then keeps going: a b c b c c d b e e f b.

The song's lyric is structured like a traditional fantasy story. Instead of a wardrobe leading to Narnia, a rabbit hole leading to Wonderland, or a train platform leading to Hogwarts, our speaker sees the following: "A crack appeared inside a wall/ A door sprang up around it... a wildish wind blew it open wide." 

While such stories are always about young people and the speaker is not that, nevertheless she has a "childish mind" and enters. After all, the door seemed to be made especially for her to find: "I could not believe I found it." 

Once she entered, did she find the fantastical fauna of Pandora from Avatar, the outlandish characters in Willy Wonka's factory, or the mystifying creatures of Oz? After all, she says, "A world of wonder lay without"...

"It was all of nature's calling." She's... outside. In nature. A really spectacular example of nature, but basically just outdoors. She lists: "field, forest, cloud, sun, heights and valleys, ravines, ivy, thorny scenes."

Still, she is enraptured, saying that she was "surrounded" by her "heart's delight." What made this "lap of nature's sprawling" so amazing? Well, there were "cascades of salt water falling," and that doesn't usually happen; saltwater is already in the sea, and the rivers that form waterfalls on the way to the sea are freshwater, having been made by rain or melted snow. 

But aside from that salient (pun intended) fact, she felt delighted to be there because "each thing did love its place."

The chorus is simply "And so, and so it goes." This is a commonplace expression, but it is one popularized by Kurt Vonnegut in his book Slaughterhouse Five; in it, Vonnegut's narrator is usually saying "so it goes" while reacting to something negative, often a death, with a feeling between acceptance and resignation... but sometimes rue. 

Back to our song. The speaker meet "the one whose land it was" and asks for a "token," something to take back to her world as a private souvenir. She is told "no" three times. The way she phases this is that she was "thrice denied," which echoes the three times Peter denies that he knows Jesus in one night (as Jesus predicts). She asks one more time, as humbly as possible, without any "pride"...

..."and found [she'd] lost that world." Oh, no. She has somehow been cast out-- or more pointedly, cast back in, to within her wall.

She has "returned as one now broken/ To a crumb, a rag, a withered leaf." This is how she sees her world-- the one she'd always lived in before entering that "door"-- now. 

She freezes in the "chilly wind of cold relief." Wait, why is she relieved? We thought she was sad to be back. Perhaps this uses the other meaning of "relief," a sculpture carved into a wall. When something is said to be "thrown into relief" it is made real, given depth. 

Like Dorothy returning from Oz, she is "as from a dream awoken." 

But also like Dorothy, she can go back (there are more than a dozen books in the Oz series). Alice returns through the lookingglass, and the children pass through the wardrobe into and out of Narnia as if it had a revolving door. 

Here, too, the speaker ends her song: "But then a crack appeared inside a wall/ And a door sprang up around it." She gets to go back in... as long as she never takes anything out with her.

In most cases, we imagine the questing youth going "into" the new world. Here, the speaker goes "outside" through the door that the crack opens in the wall; the world of wonder lay not "within" but "without."

She lives in a world of walls. A house, a city. She has had the opportunity to explore nature-- maybe she went camping?-- and now sees her urban world pale by comparison. But she knows that to return with a shell or stone is to subtract from the very nature she loves.

Now, however, she has something more important that a thing to remind her of that wondrous place-- she has a way to get back to it. And she can't wait until she does.

There, "each thing did love its place." The same seems not to be the case in the city. At least for her; she realizes she hates it there.

(While the young adult novels referenced herein are relatively recent, in history-of-literature terms, the idea of going through a portal into another world is at least as old at the tale of Orpheus following Eurydice through a cave into Pluto's cavernous underworld.)

Vega's first song on her first album in years is "Crack in the Wall," and the first song on her debut was "Cracking." Does she consider this album, seven years after her previous one, some sort of new debut? 

Next Song: Fool's Complaint

Stockings

The main character in this song is a woman who can be described as a "tease." She delights in flirting, even as she has no intention of fulfilling the desire she provokes.

The speaker in this song is a person-- perhaps a man, perhaps a woman-- who is caught in this web of enticement. Unfortunately, they seem to be trapped in what is commonly (at least today) known as The Friend Zone, the emotional space in which one will be a person's friend, but never anything more.

The first line is from the woman, whose technique for starting a conversation is to call attention to her legs: "'I don't care for tights,' she says... she hikes her skirt... revealing one brown thigh." (As in "Caramel," it seems the target of desire is a person of color. Or at least some who has spent some time in the sun.)

The speaker, who notices this flash of flesh, instead focuses on her "slender little fingers." Then, in a (very) off rhyme, the speaker muses that they "pull upon/ The threads of recent slumbers." Does this mean "dreams"? Has s/he been fantasizing about her at night?

Then the speaker defines a border of The Friend Zone, "where friendship ends/ And passion does begin." And it lies "between... her stockings and her skin." A friend can see the stocking, but nothing more, not the skin itself. The border is as sheer and transparent as nylon stockings.

One small complaint: While it is admirable to try to rhyme "skin" with "begin," it becomes clunky to add the "does." We have already had "fingers/slumbers," so rhyming "skin" with "where passion begins" would have been preferable to the stilted "does begin." This isn't even speech being transmitted, it's thought... so the rules of grammar are even less expected.

The Friend-Zone denizen still harbors some hope. Maybe since it is late, "she'll ask me to go dance?" (Again, "out to dance" would be better. It's "go dancing.") "But something in the way she laughed/ Told me I had no chance."

So... there never was an invitation to dance, just a hope of one. And then the speaker reads intention into something her laughs, even. It's unnerving when you know you have no chance, but think maybe you're wrong and that perhaps you do...?

Then we shift to what else we know about this temptress. Her reputation in her family, which the speaker feels is undeserved, is that she was "never nice." The speaker says that it is more subtle than that-- she is "very" nice, but that niceness comes at a "price" that is not initially evident.

The speaker, armed with this realization, again tries to find the border of The Friend Zone and finds it may also be in alcohol and its ability to lower inhibitions. "When the gin and tonic/ Makes the room begin to spin." Yes, the speaker asks "where" and answers him/herself "when." This may be one gin and tonic too many.

If we have been working our way through the stages of grief, here, we have already passed through Denial, Bargaining, and Depression (we don't seem to have experienced Anger) and have arrived at Acceptance: "There may be attraction here/ But it will never flower."

So... what now? "I'm assigned to read her mind/ In this witching hour." Wow, it's already midnight? That is late. But more to the point, why "assigned"? I heard "resigned," which I think makes more immediate sense. But "assigned" implies that someone did the assigning. Did the speaker assign him/herself? Why?

The woman certainly didn't. Unless the speaker assumed that she implied that she did at some point, which is totally in character for our befuddled speaker.

The speaker now admits that dealing with being teased is "no game for those... easily bruised." Very true.

Then s/he says something revealing: "But how can I complain/ When she's so easily amused?" At least, if s/he can't be with her in the intimate sense, s/he can be in her tantalizing company-- she's willing to keep our speaker around as entertainment, at least.

But is that all that's keeping him/her there? Having the one who toys with him/her as an audience? Once more, we find the problem with being in The Friend Zone. No, there is no way out of it into her Sanctum Sanctorum...

But there is also no way out of it and back into autonomy. Like a comet that has become a planet, s/he is trapped in her orbit-- unable to land on the surface but equally unable to break free and resume careening across the solar system.

So, there is no way out of the The Friend Zone that ends up being closer to the woman. But there is also no way out that ends up being apart from her, either, with the Zone lying unoccupied in between the two parties. As the speaker puts it: "She does not show you the way out, on the way in."

The Friend Zone lies "between the binding of her stockings and her skin." And so we see there are two meanings to the word "binding." Our speaker is bound up in this elastic edge of the stocking.

Never to be fully joined, but never to be fully free. In limbo.


Next Song:  Casual Match