New York is My Destination

Vega is from New York, but Carson McCullers (the author this album is about) was born in Georgia, so let's say this is in her voice.

Why is she going to New York? And not just to visit but to stay ("New York is where I will be from")? Because "New York is made for grander things, just like me!" What grander things? "Mountains of fame and fortune."

She imagines that the "literati"-- the most highly regarded authors and their set-- "will love me." The
"paparazzi," who stalk the famous to photograph them, will do so to her. The "glitterati" (a portmanteau of "glitter" and "literati") are wealthy sophisticates in general-- actors, models, splashy business-people, Hollywood insiders-- have also "heard of" her. Well, they will, of course, once she gets there.

The rest of the song is largely about partaking on many of New York's storied locales. "The Algonquin" is a hotel notable for its attracting many famous wags and raconteurs in the early part of the 20th Century, like Harpo Max and Dorothy Parker. "The Plaza" is a posh hotel notable for being just that.

Other places mentioned largely serve young and/or single women. "The Three Arts Club" teaches painting, drama and music and gives students a chance to display and perform their work publicly. "The Parnassus" (named after Apollo's mythical mountain) is a boarding house, largely for Julliard students (more about which below). And "Columbia" in this case is a university. "Fifth Avenue" is a major Manhattan street, noted for its high-fashion shopping.

Riding "buses" on this street, she imagines participating in conversations like: "I lost all my money for Julliard (a major performing-arts college); "I hid in the phone booth at Macy's (a major department store)" and even "I slept in a brothel on my way to my destiny." As they say back in Columbus, Georgia: mercy me!

Not only can she not wait to get to New York, she concludes, New York can't wait until she gets there! "New York's waiting for me!" she enthuses.

And they didn't know it at the time, but it seems they were.

Next Song: We of Me

Carson's Blues

Carson McCullers was an American novelist. Vega has been a lifelong affinity for her (Carson was a woman) work and even wrote a play about her life.

This song is the first of an album, Lover, Beloved: An Evening with Carson McCullers. It is the soundtrack to Carson McCullers Talks About Love (with the same subtitle), Vega's one-woman show about the writer, whom Vega plays.

The song is only two verses long. The first lists a number of things that the speaker says she'd been compared to or called: "A wounded sparrow," "a fallen deer,"  "a childish liar," "a devilish bitch."

At first, she denies being cruel, while owning that she has two sides: "I'm an iron butterfly." McCullers may not have known, but Vega certainly does, that there is a classic rock band called Iron Butterfly; while they formed a year before McCullers' death, they were not widely known until a year after.

Then, the speaker cops to sometimes being surprisingly harsh: "I can be sweet I can be wise... I can be innocent and charming and suddenly switch" to the opposite.

Even so, she still has an excuse: "you've got to understand that I've never belonged." Well, which is the cause and which the effect? Is it possible that someone who comes across as nice and then lashes out venomously might have have a hard time keeping friends?

Despite looking in from the outside, or perhaps due to that state, she says she has everyone pegged: "I've got every one of you mirrored in my deep sad eyes/ I know where you've been to and who you're afraid to be." She even quotes the Roman playwright Terence: "Nothing that is human is alien to me."

And how, without having "belonged," does she do this research? "I talk to strangers."

This short song is a portrait of someone who has said to humanity at large, "You can't fire me, I quit." Having been rejected for so long, she has begun pre-rejecting potential new friends and poisoning potential relationships. Why go through the trouble of getting hurt when you could be the one inflicting the pain?


Next Song: New York is My Destination

Horizon

"God is the horizon," said Vaclav Havel, a Czech playwright who became a dissident and was imprisoned, only to become his nation's leader after his release. I only learned that Vega wrote this song about him because she said so when introducing the song in a concert.

I had thought it was about South Africa's Nelson Mandela, but it also could have been about Poland's Lech Walesa India's Gandhi, or Israel's Natan Sharansky, imprisoned by the Soviets (OK, so he hasn't been made head of state in Israel... yet), or even Joseph from the Bible. It's also the story of some women, including Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi (she was under house arrest, not jail, but still) and Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed and then led his country, after a fashion.

The relevant verse comes later in the song, however. It starts simply: "There is a road/ Beyond this one/ ...the path/ We don't yet take." It could be the afterlife, or simply the future.

"I can feel how it longs/ To be entered upon," she continues, "It calls to me with a cry/ And an ache." She feels pulled toward it, compelled to travel its length.

What powers its attraction? "Love pulls us on to that/ Distant horizon so true."

Now we get to the biography: "I knew a man/ He lived in jail... When he was free/ He led his country."

What allows someone to rise from a prison cot to a president's chair? "He dreamed of a line/ That we call the Divine." The line being, as we now know, the horizon itself.

How do these rulers tend to lead their countries? "He taught the way of love/ And he lived in that way, too/ Love pulled him on to that distant horizon so true."

What makes us go forward, onto the next path, and the next after that? What allows us to enter the realm beyond the horizon of this life? Love.

Love of country, of self, of principles and values, of one's fellow humans. Love, even, of love itself.

Next Song: Carson's Blues

Laying on of Hands/ Stoic 2

The "laying on of hands" is the idea that touch, all by itself, has healing properties. It is often used in religious contexts.

Mother Theresa was a Nobel Prize-winning nun who dedicated her life to treating and healing the poorest of the poor in India's slums; her name is fairly synonymous with altruism.

The speaker wonders how someone so in tune with the power of touch was never curious about more... intimate touches, from which a nun by definition abstains. Most of us cannot help but heed "Love's demands," and the body's "earthly commands."

The speaker then addresses the listener: "Touch is a language," she says, and it's true. Touch can convey everything from "brutality" to "tenderness."

Well, if that's the case, "What is it you have to say to me?/ Come and talk about it." Now, of course, if "touch is a language," and the language we will be "speaking," then the "conversation" could become very personal indeed.

In fact, "our bodies are exchanged in all eternity," which sounds like re-incarnation, in which case the same soul would necessarily touch multiple bodies through the eons.

Getting back to the idea of touch being equally capable of wounding or caressing, we must ask ourselves, "In this wilderness, do we hurt or heal within our daily plans?" It's a constant choice.

The ancient Roman named Epicetus was no Mother Theresa. He was a Stoic, like the emotionless person in the previous song. The speaker opines that he was probably sexless, "slept with his hands above the covers" (and away from his "private parts").

Since he, like Theresa, was celibate, he also had no "ex-lovers" to lose sleep over. However, she did not deny herself human contact altogether.

So we have three levels of "touchers," then: those like Epicetus who don't touch anyone else at all, those like Theresa who touches others to help them but not to receive any benefit herself...

And most of us, who like to touch others and to be touched in return, in nonverbal conversation. The speaker's conclusion? Such non-touching "virtue is overrated."

She much prefers "happiness." And happiness, as Charlie Brown, taught us, is a "warm puppy." And, well, other kinds of hugs.

While this is a short song, it says a great deal about our underappreciated sense of touch. Songs often explore the sensual aspect of touch, but ignore the simple relief that being warmly touched by another person can bring. This one manages to encompass both.

Next Song: Horizon (There Is a Road)

Song of the Stoic

While the ancient belief of Stoicism was more complex than that, the word "stoic" today means a person who declines to show emotion.

The speaker here is a "man" whose life's major incident are few. Mostly, he's been "working all [his] days."

Now he's having a post-midlife "accounting": "More years are behind me now/ Than years that are ahead," so it's time to take stock.

First, he wants us to know that at 18, he "faced down" his father who physically abused him-- "18 years of pain." He does not blame his father, but the "demons" of his mental illness. Still, he is covered in "layers of bruises." So the emotion here is dignity, self-assertion.

He left home and "learned to love the road," an emotional response. He learned that some things can be "spoken" and some not.  He does physical labor, earning his "coin" with "another/ Knot within [his] back." There are many emotions here.

He married, somehow, which would seem a major life milestone, but we learn of this only because he was tempted to stray. The other woman had a "gifted touch" but yet they "confine [themselves] to friendship/ And [they] stay out of the bed." It seems that he might have divorced his wife to marry her, had she been single. The fact that she would not leave her spouse to be with him must have been painful.

Now, he is "facing" another foe, "the specter of [his] age." He wants to die already: "My soul, it fights my body/ Like a bird will fight its cage," wanting to escape. He sees death as "peace" and "release."

Yet, he will not kill himself-- "I keep myself upon the earth"-- and simply accept his fate, even as he measures not his gains and achievements but only "what [he's] lost."

So that's his life's story-- abuse, then labor and massive disappointment. Has he ever had the chance at happiness? "Winged things, they brush against me/ Never mine to hold."

Instead, he has resigned himself to grinding labor, saying "I keep my eyes upon the ground/ And carry on."

Why? "Ecstasy and pleasure come at much too high a cost." Since all he has known has been pain, he has two choices-- accept pain and try to live with it... or try for happiness knowing that it will either be unattained or lost, and then pile that pain onto the existing one. Not worth it, he decides.

The man is a stoic for this reason, or reasoning. His childhood was painful, his marriage is unfulfilling, his work shows no progress for all his effort. Any idea that hope was a good thing has been beaten out of him, either figuratively or literally.

For a song about a person who avoids emotions, the story leaves the listener with a deep one: sadness.


Next Song: Laying on of Hands/Stoic 2

Silver Bridge

The idea of dying being a "crossing over" into another land or place is a universal one. So is the idea of that other land being across a body of water that has to be rowed across... or perhaps spanned with a bridge.

This song is about watching someone standing on that bridge cross over it. In other words, it's about someone dying.

The song starts with the end of the story, that it is about a "recently departed" individual who went into "that land uncharted."

There is foreshadowing in the "old man" going up to his room by "the stairway he ascended" after a goodnight kiss. The speaker reports him "struggle" all night to live, yet also reaching out to "Saturn," the king of the mythical gods.

The speaker enters the room, not sure what to do and "frozen" with indecision and "wonder." She simply "stared upon his body" in the "silver" moonlight. This moonbeam she images as the "silver bridge" in the title, between here and the hereafter.

Yet, she does nothing, having "witnessed all there was to see." She doesn't "move to him," since he "wasn't [hers] for claiming." Instead, she "withdrew."

Then she realizes he is, in fact, dead, "so much more than sleeping." She stays with him as a "vigil" the rest of the night and morning and even into the "afternoon." (Why she does not alert the authorities-- or the party for which he was "for claiming"-- much sooner is not mentioned, but highly irregular. Most would call as soon as they realized the person had died, or even if they thought he might be dying.)

The experience has had a profound impact on the speaker. She wonders about sleepless nights, and if they represent a form of "standing on that bridge." And, if so, "which way are you facing?" Is it the Land of the Living, or the "land uncharted"?

The lines are thin between sleep, unconsciousness, coma, brain death, death itself, and even animal and plant states like stasis and hibernation. It is understandable that a person with no medical training might not be able to tell the difference, certainly not by simple observation from several feet away.

The speaker seems to understand this and does not berate herself for not getting help sooner. She sincerely thought he was asleep.

But now, it seems, she is having trouble sleeping herself. And more troubled, in that she feels troubled by her inability to sleep... and worried about what that means, and what it portends.


Next Song: Song of the Stoic

Jacob and the Angel

This song is based on the Bible story of Jacob wrestling with angel.

The account in the song is not as detailed as the one in Genesis, but the general storyline is kept. One detail that is changed is that in the Bible, the fight takes place by a riverbank, not in a "room." Also, at first, Jacob does not know he is being accosted by an angel.

As in the Biblical account, the angel "smote him on the thigh" and then the two "wrestled... till morning" without speaking. At dawn, the angel "turned to fly and to flee," but Jacob held on until the angel (whom he had now identified as such) blessed him. At this point, the angel did so, although in the song the angel "smote" him again first.

Jacob learns "his other name," Israel, from the angel in this version. In the Bible, the angel (on behalf of God, presumably) gives him the name Israel: "he who strives with God."

Incidentally, this idea is probably unique to the Jews. "Islam" has a connotation of "submission" to God, as do the Christian Shaker and Quaker sects. The very observant Jews who call themselves "Haredi" do so, likewise, because they "tremble" before God (the words "Jew" and "Judaism" come from the tribe "Judah").

In any case, why is the speaker talking about this Bible story at all?

Oh, it's a metaphor for a problem in a relationship: "This thing between us must be wrestled down."
It's nice to see that she feels that the issue is to blame, not one or the other of the couple.

However, she admits that the problem is a tough one. Maybe it's an "angel" it has "wings" and "feathers." But maybe it's a "demon," as it has "teeth" and "horns." But, angel or demon, it's got "sinews" that are not going to be overcome easily.

Still, it has been identified as being discreet unto itself, and not an aspect or fault of either of them. So a least part of the battle-- knowing the enemy-- has been achieved. This bodes well.

If they are going to the Bible for a metaphor for it, perhaps they would be served by going to a religious counselor of some sort, rather than a secular marriage counselor. In any case, they have met the enemy, and he is not them-- it's a "thing," and it can be overcome.

Next Song: Silver Bridge