“In silent suspension”: Joanna Newsom’s String Theory
Peeling Back the Layers in Joanna Newsom’s Divers, Part 6
Let’s pick up from the last time, now that we’ve taken a thorough look at the tauntingly layered lines below. (If you haven’t read the prior piece, this will make a lot more sense if you start there).
Make it stop, my love!
We were wrong to try.
Never saw what we could unravel,
in traveling light,
nor how the trip debrides —
like a stack of slides!
I’ve shared a few thoughts about possible interpretations for the individual parts, including that fascinating simile: “like a stack of slides”. One area we haven’t explored, though, is the reference for the simile. In technical parlance, the image of a “stack of slides” is the vehicle for the simile. That is, it’s the creative image used to describe something more tangible, which is referred to as the tenor. When I initially thought about the lyrics, it seemed clear enough that the tenor was “how the trip debrides” — straightforward enough, right? The vehicle directly follows it, so that’s a logical conclusion, and I can imagine some interpretations.
While I’m not prepared to posit some grand theory here, I would just encourage you (and myself) to leave some wiggle room here to draw other inferences. What if the simile is talking about how they travel light? Or about what they “could unravel”? Or what they “never saw”?
I’ll leave it to your imagination.
Traveling and Unraveling
Last time, I made a passing comment about “unravel” and the fabric of spacetime. The image of a knitted scarf comes to mind, where you pull on the yarn and suddenly the whole thing falls apart before your eyes. If you think of the fabric of spacetime, wouldn’t it stand to (metaphorical) reason that when you unravel it, the component parts would be yarn? Or string?
Perhaps you’ve heard of String Theory — it’s a more modern-day physics theory of how the universe works, and for our purposes I’ll ignore the current status of its validity and any ongoing debates about it in the academic world. What intrigues me about it is its name and its primary hypothesis. String Theory proposes that when the universe is reduced to its smallest components — even smaller than atoms and particles — they’re just little wiggling strings.
In a 2016 article whose title makes it sound deceptively approachable, Dr. Ethan Siegel describes how String Theory strives to connect the theories of quantum physics with Einstein’s spacetime curvature from general relativity:
Working in three spatial dimensions is very difficult, but if you go down to one dimension, things become very simple. The only possible one-dimensional surfaces are an open string, where there are two separate, unattached ends, or a closed string, where the two ends are attached to form a loop.
Open, linear strings and closed, loop-like strings? I’m on the edge of my seat now!
Let’s go back to our discussion of Maxwell and his proposal of measuring seconds with atoms’ vibrations. Remember how I pointed out that Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein created breakthroughs in physics by unifying similarly disparate concepts? I didn’t mention earlier unifications, but more on that in a bit. Those unification theories are hard at work here — scientists are still working to unify quantum physics and general relativity, and there’s even a hope that all of these concepts will be explained by one unifying theory. It’s called the “Theory of Everything” (you might recall that was the title of a film about Stephen Hawking, who has also worked on the problem). In a similar unifying move, some scientists are proposing that String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity theory might be describing the same thing.
It probably won’t surprise you that these kinds of questions are being studied at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which I mentioned earlier. Nor that String Theory is connected with the study of wormholes. As cosmologist Paul Sutter writes,
[S]ome theorists have discovered that string theory may allow the existence of stable wormholes.
Those “stable wormholes” he describes earlier —
We might be able to build wormholes with more exotic structures. For example, cosmic strings are the theoretical fractures left in spacetime from when the four forces of nature split off from each other in the very early universe. It might be possible to thread these cosmic strings through the open throat of a wormhole, “anchoring” the ends like the cables holding up a suspension bridge, thereby stabilizing the wormhole for transit. But while most cosmologists are confident that cosmic strings exist, no such strings have been found.
I don’t know about you, but this idea of anchored suspension bridges through wormholes reminds me of a Joanna Newsom song.
Strings and Keys
Speaking of Joanna Newsom… there’s somebody who likes a good pun, am I right?! She released an EP called Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band, which was a riff on her album Ys and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. And back in 2019 and early 2020, she did a tour called “The Strings/Keys Incident”. If you’ve ever walked by a crowd waiting to get into a show by The String Cheese Incident, let’s just say you know it has a certain vibe. I’m glad Joanna doesn’t take herself too seriously!
So yes, JN had some fun with the nod to a jam band, while also alluding to her solo harp and solo piano — just strings and keys. The points of contact between herself and the instruments. The ways she makes music.
But as a master of polysemy and the layered meaning of words, I have to assume Newsom is also aware of how powerful the objects those words invoke are, and how they have long been symbols in their own right. String to connect, to tie together, to bind, and also to guide… like Ariadne’s clew guiding us out of the labyrinth. And keys to lock something or someone away, but also to unlock boxes with clues to solve the mystery, or “open doors” that lead us out to freedom.
Harps and Strings
When I think back to my childhood and watching my mom play the harp, I remember times I would stare at just one string, especially the low, metal strings near the harp column. Her finger would pull it, and then it would sit there vibrating back and forth — you couldn’t quite see the string itself, but just the widened shape of its path, and a denser area in the center where the visual impressions overlapped more.
I couldn’t find a picture, so I’ll just draw it (forgive me — I’m not an artist!):
Of course our eyes simply pick up on a general impression of the overall slightly bowed shape of the vibrating string. If we slow it down and capture just an instant of it like Muybridge may have, you start to see that the strings move in waves, like water or light or gravity.
I’m also struck by the linear yet cyclical nature of the harp’s strings. As you ascend or descend, the notes are moving in a linear way — A, B, C, and so on. But at a certain point, you spiral back to the same note (though an octave higher) — E, F, G, A, B, and so on.
Another factor when you play a string is its overtones. One string on the harp or one key on the piano has a fundamental note, but within that, a series of other sounds travel together with that fundamental. Here’s a nice description of the concept:
Let’s return once again to the line from “Waltz” about the “stack of slides”. It might be interesting to point out that harps are pretty famous for their slides. If you think of the stereotypical harp sound (aka not Joanna Newsom), it probably involves a glissando— the sound of angels playing their harps. And those angels must have debrided a lot of skin playing so many glisses! It’s part of why harpists tend to have calluses on their fingers.
If you ask a harpist (as I did), they’ll tell you that a “slide” refers to a more specific, constrained technique where you slide your thumb (for example) between strings so that you don’t have to cross over your fingers to play a series of notes. However, the word glissando comes from the French for “sliding” or “gliding”, and the umbrella musical concept is called sliding. You decide — we’re squarely in the realm of association here, not implying Newsom’s intention.
Given all that, do you wonder what would happen if a musician were to stack their slides? (Also a term my mother would say isn’t a harp thing!) But humor me — what if?
Well, since you asked. I’d have to say the closest thing I know of to a layering of glissandi is what’s called a Shepard Tone, and its close relative the Shepard-Risset Glissando. They both describe an auditory illusion where a rising or falling series of notes tricks your mind into thinking they’re sliding forever upward or downward. The illusion comes from the presence of overtones, which allow for the eternal return without ever really leaving the same set of notes, something like an Escher staircase. Not to keep tying things into Nolan films, but I find it intriguing that Christopher Nolan is so enamored of this effect:
A’s and B’s
Joanna Newsom doesn’t use many glissandi in her music, but there is a musical repetition pattern in “Waltz” that I find intriguing. It’s probably easier to draw it visually, though your ear has probably already picked up on it.
In broad terms (of course there’s some minor variation and ornamentation), the song basically has 2 musical themes or sections that repeat, and within each of those there are two repeating parts. By the way, I’m not using technical terminology here. Written out in musical notation, they roughly look like this:
Then, when you layer those onto the full set of lyrics, you see a few repeated patterns emerging. Have a look (and maybe a listen, too!) —
At the stanza level, you see the overall pattern: AAB — AAB — AAB — A. What’s interesting with those clusters of “AAB” is that the first A section starts off somewhat slow (“I believed…”), then speeds up a bit for the second A section (“I saw his ship…”), and then speeds up again in the B section (“As the day is long…”). But only to slow back down again and repeat the gradual speeding up in the next cluster!
If we look at the line level, you see two distinct patterns repeating (which has a loose resemblance to the rhyme scheme, especially for the A sections):
- A1 — A2 — A1 — A2 — A2
- B1 — B2 — B1 — B2
Lowlands and Highlands
In many ways, the song’s musical recurrence reminds me of the rhythmic, repeating shanty that Newsom references: “Lowlands Away”. Melissa Marturano wrote a great piece on the shanty and “Waltz” in 2016, sharing some of the background and implications.
Shanties served a number of purposes, but one that stands out to me is how they served to synchronize. When many people were needed to perform a task, they sang together to get themselves into the same rhythm, often using a call-and-response form. One person would sing out a line, and then the group would sing back the next (somewhat like the multiplied, multiversal Joanna Newsom voices that sing together, “Highlands away, my John”).
As Marturano points out, among the variations of the shanty (oral history has a way of creating permutations!), Newsom is clearly alluding to the branch of versions where the singer dreams of their love who is dead. And within that branch, she is most likely alluding to the variation where the woman (at home) dreams of her love (at sea) who has drowned. The 60s recording by Anne Briggs is a beautiful rendition. It’s worth a listen, where you’ll hear a similar sense of repetition (you can hear the call-and-response in this more modern recording):
The version Briggs sings is closely related to the slightly longer, slightly more graphic one catalogued in John Masefield’s 1906 collection of sea poetry, A Sailor’s Garland. Masefield marks it as a “Halliard Chanty”, referring to a ship’s halyard, or rope that sailors would pull on in unison to hoist the sails.
I dreamt a dream the other night,
Lowlands, Lowlands, hurrah, my John;
I dreamed a dream the other night,
My Lowlands a-ray.I dreamt I saw my own true love,
Lowlands, Lowlands, hurrah, my John;
I dreamt I saw my own true love,
My Lowlands a-ray.He was green and wet with weeds so cold,
Lowlands, Lowlands, hurrah, my John;
He was green and wet with weeds so cold,
My Lowlands a-ray.“I am drowned in the Lowland seas,” he said,
Lowlands, Lowlands, hurrah, my John;
“I am drowned in the Lowland seas,” he said,
My Lowlands a-ray.“I shall never kiss you again,” he said,
Lowlands, Lowlands, hurrah, my John;
“I shall never kiss you again,” he said,
My Lowlands a-ray.I will cut my breasts until they bleed,
Lowlands, Lowlands, hurrah, my John;
I will cut my breasts until they bleed,
My Lowlands a-ray.I will cut my away my bonny hair,
Lowlands, Lowlands, hurrah, my John;
I will cut my away my bonny hair,
My Lowlands a-ray.No other man shall think me fair,
Lowlands, Lowlands, hurrah, my John;
No other man shall think me fair,
My Lowlands a-ray.O my love lies drowned in the windy Lowlands,
Lowlands, Lowlands, hurrah, my John;
O my love lies drowned in the windy Lowlands,
My Lowlands a-ray.
Newsom sings, “I had a dream that I walked in the garden […] It was there that I called to my true love” and in the shanty we hear “I dreamt I saw my own true love”. And of course we hear the echoes between the shanty and “Have they drowned, in those windy highlands? / Highlands away, my John.”
A different variant of the shanty depicts a man dreaming of his love, “All dressed in white, like some fair bride”, and seeing that “A red, red rose, my love did wear”, the dreamer realizes she is dead.
Both tell the story of a dreamer and a true love who has died. Both mention the true love’s appearance, and I feel like a blending of the two comes out in Newsom’s lines (especially the paleness and the white dress)—
It was there that I called to my true love,
who was pale as millennial moons,
Honey, where did you come by that wound?
The obvious reading of this line is the dreamer asking the true love about the wound that left them dead. But in looking back at the shanty’s many versions, I can’t ignore the lines about self-mutilation and the dreamer wanting to make herself look different (so “No other man shall think me fair”). It complicates my reading of the line in “Waltz” — perhaps the true love is asking the dreamer where she “came by that wound”? I doubt it, but it’s a possible interpretation.
But there was a time when the song was sung in places other than above a ship’s prow. In the 1843 Book of Scottish Song, Alexander Whitelaw included a folksong that was originally from the early 1700s about “a young widow in Galloway, whose husband was drowned in a voyage”. Galloway is in Scotland’s southwest, in the lowlands. Scholars surmise the song inspired the dreamer variation of “Lowlands Away”, and they have similar themes, particularly the drowned lover and the refusal to marry again. You may recognize the similarities —
Nor sal I ha’e anither luve, [Nor shall I have another love,]
Until the day I dee, [Until the day I die,]
I never lo’ed a luve but ane, [I never loved a love but one,]
And he’s drown’d in the sea. [And he’s drowned in the sea.]
The song (with its very Scottish spellings) is called “The Lawlands o’ Holland”, because both this song and the shanty refer to a drowning off the Dutch coast — famous for its wind and windmills.
“I am drowned in the Lowland seas,” he said
Dutch Masters and Dutch Men
We can’t seem to get away from the Dutch, can we?! While I’m tempted to dwell on the distinction between Scottish Highlands and Lowlands, I’ll leave it aside as a distraction for now.
Newsom clearly plays on the dichotomy between Low- and High- versions of the lands, and it allows her to send the sailors from the sea into the clouds. It also gives a sense of the layering, like planes of existence placed one on top of the other.
So if the “Lowlands” are the Netherlands, then what are the “Highlands”? Some multiverse of Dutchness? Like a twisted Double Dutch. Or a mirrored sea, untethered from the earth and floating above it — from low to high. The difference between sea and sky blurs (“But the sky, over the ocean!”). And the ship? A Flying Dutchman.
The legend of the ghost ship Flying Dutchman tells of a captain who makes a bargain with the devil in order to survive a storm. The story dates back to the 1600s Dutch Golden Age, the era of Dutch colonization, but across the centuries, sailors have claimed to see it. The ship, suspended in the air, has inspired works of art, most notably Pirates of the Caribbean.
Just kidding. Probably the most well-known work about the legend is Richard Wagner’s 1843 opera Der fliegende Holländer. In one famous scene, the women of a small Norwegian town are busy spinning golden thread at their spinning wheels (“bound to a wheel”? “lashed to the prow”?), singing:
Hum and buzz! What cheerful sound!
Turn round the wheel, quick, quick, quick!
Spin the golden thread around!
Hum and buzz like magic trick!
My love sails o’er stormy sea,
And thinks of me,
Like the dreamer in the sea shanty, they are thinking of their true loves, sailing on distant seas. One girl (named Senta — surprise — the story’s main character!) does not spin, but instead contemplates the portrait of the Flying Dutchman, the captain of that famous ship. She sings the ballad of the legend:
Heigho! ho! heigho! ho! heigho! ho!
There sails a ship o’er the deep main,
With blacken’d mast and crimson’d sail,
On deck you see the man of pain,
His eyes so dark, his face so pale.
Huzza! Listen the wind! Heigho! Heigho! heigho! ho!
Huzza! See the sails spread! Heigho! heigho!
Huzza! She leaps and leaps, from wave forever, evermore!
But he can be saved, this captain so pale,
If woman’s heart in her mission not fail!But when will he find this woman so rare, this woman so rare?
Pray for the man at sea,
That woman true to him be!
Around a cape he once would sail,
And thus it was that he did hail:
“I’ll sail, I’ll sail, I’ll sail evermore!”
Huzza! Satan, he heard him hail! ho! heigho!
Huzza! Satan took him by his word! ho! heigh!
Huzza! And damned he! His ship, she leaps from wave to wave forever, evermore!
So the captain merely did what seemed logical at the time — he wished to make it through the storm. He couldn’t foresee what it would lead to. Then he got his wish, and had to sail “forever, evermore”. While not physically “lashed to the prow”, the captain and his crew were doomed to sail their ship for eternity. That sounds like someone who might say —
Make it stop, my love!
We were wrong to try.
Never saw what we could unravel
Luckily for the opera’s Dutchman, Senta does make it stop, by vowing her love for the captain.
Sea and Sky
I’ve quoted Newsom’s interview with Larry King before, when she mentioned that “There’s some character in each song that is engaged in some version of diving, falling, or … you know, diving a plane, falling through water, falling through space.” The distinction between air and water is tenuous. The twinning, mirroring, doubling, and chiastic structure that we see in Divers can be found in many lines, but to me, the quintessential one comes in “A Pin-Light Bent”:
But the sky, over the ocean!
Something about that pronouncement, filled with surprise and awe, and so visually striking. The blue expanse of sky above the blue expanse of ocean. Like some Rothko painting. This is why I find the Flying Dutchman such a compelling, if not stretchy, allusion in Divers. If you ask a scientist to explain the legend, they’ll point you in one direction: fata morgana. The term describes an optical illusion — or better, an effect of optics — where layers of cooler and warmer air create a sort of mirror in the sky that distorts what you see on the horizon (recall the meridian circle pointed straight up). This can lead to the impression that something in that limbo between sea and sky, like a ship on the water, is floating above itself. The name refers to King Arthur’s sister, the witch Morgan le Fay.
Echoes and Sounds
We’ve run across several illusions — aural and optical… The layering and doubling in these illusions makes me think of the way that a single word can carry many meanings. There’s a curious echo in “Waltz” that I can’t help but notice. I don’t want to make claims that Newsom intended me to notice it, but since I did I’ll share it here. Make of it what you will.
Drowned, bound, round, found.
Pound, hound, ground, mound.
Around, aground, astound, redound, abound.
And — sound. But also, wound (“no clock. No end.”).
Of all the common words that end in -ound, only “wound” is pronounced in two distinct ways. Wound, like a spiral, and wound, like a cut.
Sounds and Numbers
I know we’ve taken a few twists and turns, but hopefully you haven’t forgotten my promise from above, to return to unification theories. Historians celebrate Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein for their breakthroughs in unifying disparate studies. Probably for a range of reasons, the same label isn’t given to earlier epiphanies (Newton is usually called “the first”). One unification in particular stands out: that of mathematics and music.
I’ve written before about the Pythagoreans, an early mystery religion loosely connected to the Eleusinian Mysteries. The philosopher Pythagoras attempted to explain everything through numbers, and is credited with explaining the connection between music and math. Present-day scholar Tom Siegfried (who coincidentally also writes about multiverses), tells the story well:
All members of the Pythagorean cult had to recite an oath crediting him with identifying the numbers “which contain the fount and root of ever-flowing nature.”
Specifically, Pythagoras identified the root of reality in what he called the tetractys, consisting of the first four integers: 1, 2, 3 and 4. Added together, those numbers equal 10. Ten, Pythagoras concluded, is the “perfect” number, the number that holds the key to understanding nature.
And why 1, 2, 3 and 4? Because those numbers were the key to creating harmonious sounds.
Imagine plucking a taut string of fixed length, producing a musical note. If you pluck a string half as long, you get another note, separated from the first note by an octave. If the strings are plucked simultaneously, the two notes are harmonious. In other words, a 2:1 ratio of string lengths produces a pleasing sound. In a similar way, other harmonious musical intervals called the fourth and the fifth represent string length ratios of 4:3 and 3:2. Pythagoras realized that these harmony-producing ratios all involved the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4. Therefore, he concluded, their sum, 10, was the key number for developing a theory of the universe.
This division of string lengths and the notes they produce is called an overtone series (or harmonic series) — you might even call it a different kind of string theory.
You can hear it played in this NOVA clip. You can see it almost literally in the shape of the harp — the triangle shape allows for lower strings to be quite long, while higher notes are played on much shorter strings. The harmonic series “is a feature of physics, affecting waves and frequencies in ways we can see and hear and ways we can’t.”
Pythagoras felt so strongly about these numbers that he went so far as to use them to describe the cosmos, in what’s referred as the “music of the spheres”. He believed that the planets were literally humming along in their orbits! The concept lasted well into the Scientific Revolution. This harmony found in music was their way of describing phenomena at the scale of the heavens, much like what String Theory and other modern physics is attempting to do.
It does make me wonder — if Einstein had his Theory of Relativity relating Time to Space, does Newsom have her own? Does Divers have its own version of a unification theory? Perhaps.
Love is not a symptom of time.
Time is just a symptom of love
Put in more mathematical terms — Love is not measured by Time, but rather Time is measured by Love.
Thanks again for spending time Right Here with me! I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey.
Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.
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