Tired of Sleeping

This seems to be a song about illness, told from the point of view of the ailing one.

If the idea of "sleeping" is literal, then this person has intense lethargy, such as with chronic fatigue syndrome, or is perhaps in an actual coma. If it is metaphoric, it can be seen as a state of severe depression, in the psychological, clinical sense.

In either case, the person is aware that she is sick and longs for her wakeful energy to return: "I'm tired of sleeping."

Why? She is not having nightmares, at least not insufferable ones: "The dreams are not so bad." Rather, she feels guilty as her lack of productivity, as if she is aware that others are doing everything for her she is usually capable of doing herself: "There's so much to do."

One of the people, perhaps the main person, caring for her is her mother. It is bad enough to have some paid nurse or orderly checking up on you. But to have your own mother continue to have to mother you as adult is heartbreaking.

Next, she becomes aware of an "old man." She realizes that he is trying to communicate with her. However, she "just can't hear what he's saying," either because he is speaking too quietly, or-- since she feels she just can't hear him-- that the fault is her illness'.

Who is he? Her doctor? A priest? We meet him again later for more clues.

First, we switch from an old man to "kids." They are "playing in pennies," that is, gambling with pennies as the stakes. They seem to have plenty to play with, as they are "up to their knees in money."

But they are also up to their knees in "dirt," perhaps the speaker's opinion of what money is worth. "All your money won't another minute buy," sings the rock group Kansas in "Dust in the Wind." So someone near death might see this quest for money as useful as a quest for dirt.

Now, where is this dirt? At the "churchyard steps." This brings religion into the mix. Combined with the pennies, these images together recall the imagery of moneychangers outside the Temple. And we all know how Jesus felt about that.

Further, the kids are at the "steps" of the church, or more at the steps of the "yard" before the "church." Near enough physically to see it. But while gambling, spiritually distant indeed. For the sake of pennies, they forgo the desire to enter the church and find true "riches."

Now, we return to the man. He "ripped out his lining." We are not sure yet why he would do so, but at this point we assume that she means the lining of a coat or suit jacket.

No. He somehow ripped out the lining of his "body"! Yes, "He tore out a piece of his body." Dare we ask which piece? He wanted to show "us"-- the speaker and her mother-- his "clean quilted heart."

This is quite graphic. And also quite impossible. Aside from the anatomical issues, hearts are made of muscle and are not "quilted." We are left to believe this is an hallucination or dream image.

But of what? The most common image of a person holding his own heart is Jesus, with his hands holding the Sacred Heart.

On the other hand... Jesus was not "old." He was only 33 at the time of his death. So this could be a conflation of Jesus and the Father...?

If the old man is a doctor, perhaps she sees him open his lab coat and show her the donor heart she is to receive, but in her illness-addled state, she sees the images she describes.

What is clear is that the image is a subconscious-based one, a dream image or hallucination. Her condition is medical, so it makes sense that her subconscious is showing her anatomical imagery.

The last image is of a "bird" that has been snared. It is "on" a string, but has not landed to perch there, as if on a branch or telephone wire. Rather, it is "hanging" from it. Further, she cannot leave the string, as she would of course be able to if she has simply lighted there. No, she is "twisting," "dancing," and "fighting" to be loose. She knows that "her small life" depends on her breaking free.

This is an apt metaphor for someone in a coma or other such state. The person-- the consciousness that is a person, the self-- is confined in the uncooperative body, like a trapped animal.

She wants to hear what the old man is saying. She wants to do things for herself, and have her mother stop tending her. She is spending all her psychic energy to re-enter the world of interaction and communication, but she is emotionally exhausted. She just wants to be well already!

The lyrics offer no resolution, and leave us with the frustrated invalid. But the music, which repeats the chorus several times, ends with an upward modulation. The entire time, the song has been sung in a low register. The final time, the melody line is noticeably higher, with a shade of echo.

This may be the singer's way of indicating that the soul has left the body and it, at least, is free.


IMPACT:
The song is the first on the album Days of Open Hand. Which won a Grammy. For Best Album Package.

Well, better than nothing.


Next Song: Men in a War

Wooden Horse

Here, Suzanne Vega treats the mystery of Caspar Hauser. This person appeared one day in 1800s Germany. He, then a teen (possibly 16), made several claims: that he had been held in captivity all his life until then, that his father was a now-deceased cavalryman, and, later, that people were trying to kill him. Over the course of his short life, many kindly people took Hauser in, some of whom later denounced him as a congenital liar; it may have been that he was simply a person with mental issues that included a loose grasp of the truth.

He has been the subject of endless speculation, including that he was of noble blood; this claim has since been weakened by DNA evidence. Whole books have been written on the case of Caspar (or Kaspar, or Gaspard, depending on the language of the author), and much "information" is available online.

Vega's haunting song starts with a line that explains, from Hauser's point of view that he "came out of the darkness" of solitary confinement. He brought one artifact of that time in his life-- one of his toys, a "small, white wooden horse."

Then he makes a claim about this toy: "What was wood became alive." It entirely possible that a person kept in confinement, not even able to see his jailer, would impute life to an inanimate object, if only to keep from deeper insanity. We witnessed this phenomenon in the film Castaway, in which a man (played by Tom Hanks) maintains his sanity on an otherwise uninhabited island by befriending a volleyball on which he draws a face (The brand of the ball is Wilson, and thus he names it; it has been noted that Hank's wife is one Rita Wilson).

"In the night, the walls disappeared/ In the day they returned," Hauser continues, describing the idea that, while dreaming, his thoughts were unconfined. But when he awoke, he was again limited by his reality.

On the day he first became known to the public, he did so by handing a note to a soldier, telling him, "I want to be a cavalryman like my father." This seems to be all he was able to say, at first, aside from "horse." The song repeats that part of Hauser's story.

Barely audibly, Vega sings "And I fell under/ A moving piece of Sun/ Freedom." This may be the reaction of someone who has only recently become aware of the seeming movement of the Sun across the sky after lifelong imprisonment.

Taken into various people's homes, he was occasionally left alone. In several cases, he emerged with unexplained wounds. He began to feel, as the song relates, "afraid [he] may be killed." Since someone was bothering to harm him, he concluded "I know I have a power" that his attacker wanted to extinguish.

As it happened, ive years after he emerged, Hauser was dead, killed by a stab wound. Doctors could only conclude that it may have been self-inflicted. As little is known of Hauser's death as of his childhood and life.

The song, like Hauser's story, and the stories he told about himself, lacks rhyme. And-- given that so many aspects of his life are either unknown, fabricated (by Hauser himself as well as by his supporters and detractors), or the subject of Hauser's being brainwashed by his early jailers-- there is not much reason, either.  

There are monuments in Germany to Hauser, one at his grave and one at the spot at which he was stabbed. A library's worth of books, as well as films and other songs, have treated the subject of this mysterious man and his enigmatic existence.

Vega's conclusion seems to be that, from a few shabby threads, one can weave an identity, a life, and a legacy. This may also be due to the human penchant for seeing patterns where there are none-- we abhor a vacuum as much as Nature itself, and fill it with ourselves.


Next Song: Tired of Sleeping

Gypsy

This is one of Vega's loveliest songs altogether. It is a love song-- technically a break-up song, but not the acrimonious kind. The Japanese farewell, "sayonara," means "since it must be so," and that is the sighing, bittersweet sort of farewell this song evokes.

The song begins with a recognition that the two lovers are from different worlds. "You come from far away," it begins, and refers to the couple as a pair of "strangers."

He comes from a land of "sunrise," but they meet and form their relationship at "night." This is "where" they come to "know each other now," by dint of having recognized "the sign" of their mutual attraction.

The chorus is at once tender-- "hold me like a baby/ That will not fall asleep"-- and passionate: "Let me hear you through the heat." Not many relationships manage to encompass both sorts of affection.

The next verse refers to the foreign lover as being a "jester." The verse unfolds with more words that evoke a Medieval or Renaissance setting: "courtyard," "women/ With the dimples and the curls," "mischievous," "blowing skirts."

There is a hint of playful jealousy here-- all sorts of women "distract" the fellow, that rogue... but he remains hers.

More old-timey imagery in the next verse: an "earring," a "potter," a "tale." She describes his features and traits colorfully. His hands are like "water," his young face belies his accumulated "wisdom," he can tell a story as well as a "fool" (here a synonym for the above "jester"). Yet, while a fool causes chaos, this fellow is an "arranger of disorder."

As much as she loves this man, she knows it has to end. Yet, he has influenced her future choices. She describes to him her new beau-- not to cause him envy, but to to compliment him by saying: "See how much you affected my life! I can now only date men like you. And since I can't have you..."

And who is her new swain? He is also a storyteller, "a spinner/ Of strange and gauzy threads." He also has hands she admires, that are "sweetest" and "softest."

And he also is a traveler... but now someone she can travel with. "We'll blow away forever," she says, "and go on to different lands." Remember the first word in the song was "you," which now switches to "we," meaning her and... not him.

She now bids farewell to the first man, saying that he is not to seek her now that she has "another." Still, he should be gratified in knowing that he is with her in any case, in her heart: "with me you will stay."

How will he know that she still misses him and cherishes their time together? "You will hear yourself in song." Namely, this one.


Next Song: Wooden Horse

Language

Many lyricists, poets, and other writers have expressed frustration with the limits of language, even with the million-worded English. Barry Gibb wrote, for the Bee Gees, "It's only words/ But words are all I have/ To take your heart away." Woody Allen told Annie Hall: "'Love' is too weak a word for what I feel. I lurve you. I loave you. I luff you-- two Fs. Yes, I have to invent..." John Keats wrote to his love, Fanny, "I want a brighter word than 'bright,' a fairer word than 'fair.'" Even Shakespeare has Hamlet mutter: "Words, words, words."

Here, Vega expresses the same problem. "These words are too solid, they don't move fast enough/ To catch the blur in the brain/ That flies by and is gone." She wishes it would be "liquid," so it could "be rushing in."

Well... actually, would that be an improvement? No, it would rush in and fill in the empty space, flooding it and overwhelming it. 

What there is, what is there, actually solves the problem of language's inadequacy. What is there is "silence." And one "more eloquent than any word could ever be," at that.

Liking this idea, Vega then applies it to other contexts. "I'd like to meet you/ In a timeless, placeless place/ Somewhere out of context." If you are going to be wordless, where and when else could you do it but in a "timeless, placeless place"?

Since this is impossible outside of the physics we can readily access, she suggests a spot where, instead of language doing so, "silence" can "come rushing in." 

She knows the spot, as they have been there before. It is a building on Manhattan's Little West Twelfth, so called because it is only 2-3 blocks long. "It's not very far/ And the river is there" (this is either the tiny the High Line River or, more likely, the Hudson, which the street dead-ends into). 

She wants to go near sunset, when "The Sun and the spaces are all laying low." As its name indicates, the street in on the western side of the island, where the sunset view over the river is probably very visible.

Silence is so attractive that she even forswears language altogether: "I won't use words again." Their multiple meanings and vagueness make them untrustworthy for communication: "They don't mean what I meant/ They don't say what I said."

Words are also superficial, she adds. Harking back to the idea of language being "solid," Vega says that they are "just the crust of the meaning." She means not a bread crust but the Earth's crust, as she continues that they have "realms underneath," entire subterranean caverns that have never been probed or explored, "never touched, never stirred, or even moved through."

Compounding the frustration with the limitation of words is the fact that the only way to express this frustration is with, yes, more words. Well, there is music. And the visual arts, like music, sculpture, and dance. 

But also just... silence. More eloquent than any words could ever be.

Next Song: Gypsy

Calypso

Vega is not the only one to have been enchanted by this mythical nymph, whose name means "to hide or deceive."

Jacques Cousteau named his boat for her, and John Denver wrote a song with this same title about that scientist. There have been other US and UK military ships with the name as well. The piece of tech that is branded Calypso is, aptly, an underwater camera.

There is an entire genre of Latin dance with this name; Harry Belafonte recorded an album of its music. Calypso is also the name of a moon of Saturn, an asteroid, and what NASA called its "Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO)" orbiter.

And "Calypso" is a town in North Carolina, a cave in Malta, a soap opera in Venezuela, an airplane in Belgium, and an orchid found almost everywhere.

But the most appropriate use of the name must be Calypso Deep, the lowest point in the Mediterranean...

Because Calypso, according to Homer, lived on the Mediterranean coast. And it was she who kept Odysseus in thrall for seven of the ten years between his leaving the Trojan War and his return to his beloved Penelope. Yes, of all of the monsters he faced in The Odyssey, the most victorious over him used no other weapon than song.

Vega tells the tale from the sea nymph's viewpoint. She has Calypso introduce herself and explain that she saved Odysseus from "drowning."

The time of this song? The day he leaves after seven years. "Now today, come morning light, he sails away/ After one last night, I let him go."

She is aware that the only reason he stayed is that she made him. She had hoped that he would eventually simply love her of his own. But, while she "could taste the salt on his skin," she knew it was both "salt of the waves and of tears and while he pulled away, I kept him here for years."

While she was beautiful-- "my garden overflows... My hair blows long as I sing into the wind"-- she knew that her willowy wiles were no match for Penelope's pull on him.

She is well aware that his departure is permanent. "It's a lonely time ahead," she acknowledges, but "I do not ask him to return."

Instead, "I will stand upon the shore with a clean heart and my song in the wind."

There is no proper chorus, but five times in this short song, Calypso repeats "I let him go." It seems she is of two minds about this decision.

One is that she proud of herself. It would have been easy to continue to imprison Odysseus eternally-- she could have made him immortal. But she knew that the relationship was forced, and so false. And she finally could not allow the situation to endure. So she did the grown-up thing and let him go. "Yes, the whole mess was my fault-- but I fixed things in the end and now I want credit for that," she seems to say.

So much for her mind. Her heart is very upset with the new reality, however. "I let him go!" it weeps. "How could I have done such a thing! He's gone forever, and I'm alone again, and he could have just stayed here, and I could have been at least falsely happy instead of truly miserable. This is just awful. Yes, the situation had to end, but I'm still so, so sad that it did."

The first thing Calypso told us about herself was not that she was immortal or magical or even musical, but that she has "lived alone." Now that Odysseus is gone, she foresees "a lonely time ahead." Her solitary status is how she defines herself.

If she could only find someone to love her for her many gifts, to love her for her "sweetness," her beauty, and her talent. And not someone who was already taken, someone she had to force to stay. Surely in all the sea there is a lonely sailor with no one waiting at home, who would willingly stay and hear her sing eternally while combing and combing her long hair.

Maybe he won't be Odysseus. But Jason's a hunk, too.


Next Song: Language