Carson's Last Supper

The "last supper" everyone means when they use that term is, of course, Jesus' last supper the night before his crucifixion.

This song is about, and in the voice of, Carson McCullers, a (female) American author who did, to be fair, die younger than average-- at 50, of a stroke, and she was not healthy leading up to that.

The song is about a metaphorical supper, however, one at which all the world is welcome: "Each one belongs at this feast."

This includes both the "rich... whole... humble... grand" and the "poor... broken... twisted... proud." Both "the sinner and the sinned-against."

What will they drink to at this feast? Again, both the "pleasures... gains... bliss" on the one hand and the "pains... losses... sorrows" on the other.

She welcomes them all: "Come and be at this table." She urges them to take what is hers, and to share what is theirs in turn. When this happens, "All come together, feeding the soul."

She is saying that her work has attempted to encompass the entire human condition, because only this way can art be satisfied, can the reader be satisfied, can the writer be satisfied.

And when all elements of humanity are represented, the artist and audience will "be as one solid body together."

She is completely dedicated to this ideal. "This is my stand... one strong, true purpose... no hope of rest."

"The love of my life," she says, "is humanity." And yes, she means as far as representing all of humanity in her stories, but to the end of connecting fully with her readers. They have to be able to see themselves in her stories, and to identify with all her characters.

Even if you are not a Southern cafe owner who has been betrayed... you have been betrayed, at some point in your life, so can see yourself in the cafe owner.

The song is the last in a one-person show that Vega wrote about McCullers, and she plays the author onstage. So it's fair to say that this is what Vega hopes she has been able to do in her own work-- to represent, and thereby connect with, all of humanity.

Yes, you might say, but aren't most of Vega's songs about herself?

Maybe, but what better way to connect with humanity than to be... a human?


Next Song: [none so far]

The Ballad of Miss Amelia

This song is from Suzanne Vega's one-person show about the author Carson McCullers. It's a retelling of the plot from her story "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe."

The basic plot is about a woman, Amelia, who marries the wrong man. He almost ruins her life, but she chases him off (with violence). For a while, she is happy with a new man. But then the first one comes back to finish the job (with violence). What made it worse was that the new man helps him.

Framing this story, Vega expresses that his is a very Southern story: "On any Southern afternoon... a face appears inside a house." The face is described as being "terrible... sexless... white... and dim."

It's the face of Amelia, "waiting by the window... sitting by the shutter/ Remembering the laughing/ In he cafe down below."

It makes sense that her face would bear a "terrible" look, if she is remembering the brief good times with the second man. After all, was it all a lie, if he could turn on her with so little provocation, and to aid the man who wanted to hurt her at that?

Why exactly this story is so Southern, I am not sure. It does smack of Tennessee Williams.

Maybe the humidity makes everything sultry and torrid.


Next Song: Carson's Last Supper

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

Big Space

In glancing over the lyrics, I'm going to take a stab here and say that this song is about songwriting. Let's see if I'm right.

There is a metaphor of janitorial or maintenance work, perhaps for some sort of municipal job. We have words like "network," "fixing," "paperwork," "pipeline," "discipline," "weekend," and "swept up like garbage."

The idea of work pervades; the terms "network," and especially "paperwork" and "brain work" repeat several times throughout. Songwriting is not just a job, it's a grind. It's not just work, it's dirty work.

But how is any of this about songwriting, and not just about... work?

The song starts with a man telling our speaker to "stand in your own shoes" and to "look from your [own] direction."

The speaker responds that she'd "rather stand in someone else's." This is what John Keats called "negative capability," and what we today call empathy. Keats put it: "If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel."

Seeing things from another's "perspective" is key to the poetic task. The dialogue continues that the two are "close to the middle" of something and "looking for a center," a unifying element between them that can allow them to communicate. But what if there isn't any, what if "it turns out to be hollow?" Well, then the act of looking itself becomes the solution, since "we" are doing that together; "We could be fixing what is broken."

Simply by her singing and her audience listening, an experience is being shared and a bridge is being built across the chasm between the two parties.

And now comes the chorus that says this is not just about series of forms being filled and filed. "Between the pen and the paperwork"-- in the space taken up by the ink forming the words, the "language" itself-- and "between the muscle and the brain"-- in that nerve, the "pipeline" that carries signals between the two...

...There must be "passion." There must be "feeling." Or else it is just "paperwork." It's not art without the passion and the feeling. It could be just "duty and... discipline." But she wants to go "beyond that."

Yes, but why is the metaphor not, say, working in a garden to produce flowers instead of vegetables? Or painting a portrait instead of a barn wall? Why use the metaphor of wires and pipes, of iron tools and aluminum filing cabinets, things that are colorless and lifeless?

Because not all songs are about love.

This one, for instance, is about "anger in a cold place." Maybe the man at the start is angry with her, frustrated at her always trying to see things from his side, from guessing his mindset and motives, from psychoanalyzing him. Instead of walking a mile in his shoes, as the cliche he quotes goes, she should "stand in [her] own shoes" for once, he tells her.

They are in a Catch-22. She feels that there is a gulf between them. She feels that she should be able to heal this rift if she can see things from his side of it. But it is this very pretentiousness that caused the problem to begin with! Her trying to see things from his side is his problem.

She intends it as empathy. He feels it as an invasion.

She has yet to sort this out. "All feelings fall into the big space"-- possibly the "hollow" between them-- and her method of dealing with "feeling" is to put it in a "pipeline." Maybe by writing about it, she can sort the pieces out.

Imagine a canyon. Throwing logs into it randomly is not going to create a bridge from one side to the other. Even if you fill it with haphazard logs, you still will not be able to get from one side to the other. One requires flat planks, lined up regularly-- some form of order-- a "network," a "pipeline"-- to create that bridge to carry feelings from her to him and back.

But there is a river in the canyon. Even the feelings that fall into this big space are "swept" away. In the municipal imagery of the song, "like garbage on the weekend." Instead of forming a line, they are brushed aside into the "avenues of angles."

So I'm wrong. The janitorial and bureaucratic imagery are metaphors for writing, but perhaps not songwriting. Maybe it's letter-writing between lovers. And it is so hard, it starts to feel like work.

She sees a problem, but she only has one tool to solve the problem-- her ability to assume another's perspective. She's going to empathize her way out of the problem she empathized her way into! That's like trying to dig out of a hole instead of climbing out, just because you have a shovel.

She should go back to her side. And instead of trying to guess what he's about, she should ask. And if he is not as voluble as her (he seems to lean on cliche), she should wait. And before she concludes that, yeah, fine, now she knows, she should make sure by asking again.

In trying to be both people in the relationship, she is making him feel left out. He keeps stepping back, once in a while dumping his feelings into the big-- and expanding-- gulf between them.

Unless she starts listening instead of talking for them both, the whole relationship is going to fall into the big space, and be swept away.


Next Song: Predictions

Book of Dreams

As befits a song about dreams, this song is surreal, full of non-sequiturs, and stream of conscious-- or, more accurately, subconscious-- imagery and sound.

It is constructed to feel unconstructed, yet to deconstruct it is our task.

The song begins with the repeated line that contains the title: "In my book of dreams." This repetition serves to flash a warning: dream-imagery ahead! It also mimics the rhythm of someone drifting off, or the repetitious movements made to induce hypnotic slumber.

The wind that pushes us into the waters of the subconscious is an "urgent whisper." This is not given, but taken for this purpose, and from the "you," perhaps the listener (whom we shall consider a man for clarity's sake alone, to be able to use a different pronoun).

We know these are waters we travel because of the next series of images. The "arc of a white wing," which was not just taken this time but stolen, could be that of a seagull, or perhaps a sail looks like a white wing . Then she "rode like foam on the river... turned its tide..." So yes, the dreamworld is more an waterway, in which there are no roads, barriers or borders, than a land-bound place.

However, this is not a river of water. It is a "river of pity." She does not sink into it, but rides like foam on its surface. This recalls the expression "to wallow in pity," which this speaker decidedly does not do. Instead, she turns pity's tide to "strength." In doing so, she "heals" a "hole" than had been "ripped" in... not the sailcloth, but in "living."

So the dreamer has undergone some recent trauma, a hole that was ripped in her life. But rather than succumb to pity, she responded with fortitude. This is reflected in the active, forceful verbs that start each line: "took," "stole," "turned" "healed."

Even "rode" is not passive here. We car passengers think to "ride" is passive while to "drive" is active, but here she "rode the foam," like a horse or bicycle, so the verb reflects an actor, not one acted upon or along for the ride.

Evidently, she records her dreams in a journal or book, and a hardy one, too: "The spine is bound to last for life/ Tough enough to take the pounding." This could also refer to her own backbone, which we have just seen is formidable.

The pages of the book are "made of days of open hand" (whence the album's title). This expression implies that her days are spent in opening her hand, a gesture of both generosity and acceptance, as well as honesty.

Further, we see that the book is considered important, as the pages are numbered in "silver." This could also be a reference to money; this book also has elements of a ledger of accounts.

Yet, the book is also mundane, as the highlights are not done in gold or diamonds, say, but in ho-hum "magic marker"-- which sounds "magical" but which everyone knows is not.

We have been working, to this point, under the assumption that the book is a record of her dreams. Yet, we now she she uses it to "take the name of every prisoner." This is a somewhat shocking revelation! Does she really feel that those who have relationships with her are trapped by her, captured and kept, with no freedom to leave? Or is it that this idea applies to those in her dreams?

Perhaps he is not the victim... but she is. She may want to let people, thoughts, images, go-- but cannot. They are trapped in her memory, and they stalk the prison yards and dungeon passages of her dreams. Therefore, their names are in her book.

She promises that "yours is there," meaning the name of whomever is being addressed. He hopes that he is trapped only in her memory and subconscious, not her clutches...

The first verse was about active dreaming. She says she "stole [his] urgent whisper," and then proceeds to ignore it, and the pity that came with it. Instead, she actively turns the tide and heals the hole in her life. Then she describes her dream journal as being strong as well, and both special and approachable.

She concludes by telling the listener-- the ones that whispered pity before-- that he is part of her dreams, even though she rejected his sympathy. She still recalls the fact of it, and seems to even use it as a pushing-off point. Her rejection of the pity is part of what drives her to heal herself.

She doesn't thank him for this. But she doesn't forget him, either.

Next Song: Institution Green