“Bored, and amazed”: Reflections on Making and Mastery in Joanna Newsom’s Make Hay
Part 2 of 3
Picking up the thread from from Part 1, where we traced a path from hay to doubling to spirals to lathes to record-making and ultimately to the musical references and mechanical breakdown we see in “Make Hay”… In this second segment, we’ll continue to explore the many turns of Joanna Newsom’s layered tune.
If you haven’t yet read the first part, give it a read!
What we have here is a song about making, and these questions of permanence and legacy linger with me. Even the physical artifact that the maker leaves behind is itself subject to the sanding and beveling of time, as Ozymandias pointedly teaches us — “Look on my works[!]”.
Yes, Newsom draws our attention to making . But, ever the wordsmith, at the same time she explores the use of the word “make”. While the question “What did I make?” implies the desire to create something, and while the song’s repeated pattern of ‘x made y’ implies an equality among the phrases, if you look closely at the instances of “making” in the song, you’ll notice a more tenuous relationship:
buzzards make circles
tillers make hay
wind made the dust
sin made the snake
Mama made us
Adam made ribs
cattle make steak
A question of agency arises. How did sin make an animal? How did an animal make a cut of meat? And what was Adam doing — working on his BBQ recipe?
No doubt, the Adam and the ribs referenced here harken back to Eden:
And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
— Genesis 2:20–24
This is not the first time Newsom has taken a wry and challenging look at the myth of Eden, the myth that casts men as pre-existing and innocent, while framing women as derivative, subservient, wayward, and contriving. In her paean to women and innocence, “‘81”, Newsom speaks of equality:
I found a little plot of land,
in the garden of Eden.
It was dirt, and dirt is all the same.
That’s not just any dirt, though — it’s edenic dirt. Verse 7 in the Genesis chapter above tells us, “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”. (On a side note, the bible passage shows a solitary act by a masculine god, but in the Greeks’ telling of how humans were formed, it is Prometheus who forms the clay, and — accounts vary — Athena or Demeter who breathes life into it). This, then, is the dirt that formed humans, which JN reminds us is “all the same”.
So we have Adam, the ribs, the snake, sin, the clay, and the wind that animates it, which places us at the scene of the original making: the creation of humankind, the creation of the world.
But the Eden myth, typically, is the story of the Fall. We see a reminder of that event in the song: “And we were gored, and abased”. The word “abased” means to be brought down. Whether in humiliation and shame, like the story of Adam and Eve, or physically brought down, like Icarus after his transgression of getting too close to the heat.
What about that word “gored”? We often hear of “blood and gore”, and indeed the word means to be covered in blood. There are more meanings, however. A gore can refer to a whirlpool, spinning the speaker around. A gore can be any number of triangular shapes, making up dresses, hot air balloons, umbrellas, sails, or parachutes. Though I’m not sure where that leaves us.
Or, you may hear of goring from farmers:
Gore-furrows are a technique in plowing. Ploughing, as the British would spell it, happens after the harvest, to maintain the soil’s nutrients, turn the earth, and prepare it for planting after the winter. A natural part of the cycle, where the dying plant remains begin to decompose and eventually nourish the next year’s crop.
Taken together in the sense of farm cultivation, “gored, and abased” conjures up an image of the field etched with grooves from the plow, then flattened out with the harrow. (And yes, that’s where we get the word “harrowing”).
These paired words draw me in with their dichotomous, polar tugging. They remind me of the litany toward the end of “Time, as a Symptom” (A way a lone a last a loved): a based a dored e rased a mazed a chord a daze.
They’re also layered with polysemy, as we can see above. Take another example — “we were bored, and amazed”. “Amazed” means to astound or perplex. But “a-mazed” can also imply putting someone in a maze. Or in a labyrinth. Like the minotaur, who roamed about Daedalus’s puzzle until the tributes were sent, to be gored and eaten.
And we’re all familiar with the word “bored”. The song itself begins on a note that could be construed as boredom: “so long…”
But boring also has a second sense, and much like goring it’s the sense of being pierced or hollowed. This word returns us to a familiar object — the boring machine, otherwise known as the lathe.
Why do we see the lathe appearing once more? Start with a block of material, spin it in the lathe and cut its edges round. Now you have a cylindrical shape. Start cutting out the center, like you would for a bowl. Except, make that hollowed-out center very straight and very long.
No longer just a vessel, it’s become a “vessel that we fired”.
When lathes became sophisticated enough to cut metal, one of their primary applications was to bore cannon and gun barrels:
And we see this object toward the end of “Make Hay”, in a hauntingly beautiful metaphor.
And the sun stares, stalling,
Into the dimming barrel of night,
Where the stars are falling?
Newsom has transformed night into a gun barrel aimed at the sun. The threat of death, in this image of a hold-up, becomes the threat of darkness which then recalls the threat of death. But the imagery also functions on a cosmic scale, painting the death of a sun collapsing into a black hole, and gathering the light from stars around it.
Indeed, there are echoes of guns and war elsewhere in “Make Hay”, as there are elsewhere in Divers. While “all of us plough our row” speaks to farming and the grooves of records, it also calls up those rows of etched earth during the Great War: trenches. From the trenches, the sounds soldiers heard were the sharp cry of their officer’s whistle to go “over the top” for a charge. They would also hear the whistle of shells completing their parabolic arcs, hoping they would miss their mark, hoping they would land wrong.
Above them, the first fighter pilots criss-crossed the sky, hoping they would not be “landing wrong”. They took aim at enemy planes, sighting them in the crosshairs or on the dot. Curiously enough, those dots and crosses appear in larger form, as insignia to distinguish the fliers’ friends from foes.
The roundel and the iron cross. These were the dogfights that John Purroy Mitchel aspired to join, “to get over to the western front, where I can do some work that will count”. Whether from enemy fire or equipment malfunction, many pilots would lose their lives.
From the lowest to the highest,
but even at the highest,
We were bored, and amazed,
In accord, in a daze,
All before our time.
It was before our time.
It was before their time — the flying aces on high and the entrenched doughboys down below. They died too young, martyrs for their country’s cause.
On the homefront, the battle was for people’s hearts and minds. The war machine needed everyone to pitch in, whether able-bodied soldiers or women operating lathes in a munitions plant. Propaganda permeated the culture, in newspapers, radio, and moving pictures. For instance, Cecil B. DeMille’s film “Joan the Woman” tells of a WWI soldier who unearths Joan of Arc’s sword in the trenches, and is then inspired to cross no-man’s land in a daring, fatal mission. Images on screen were mirrored in shop windows and elsewhere.
Yet these messages didn’t strike the right emotional chord in all citizens — there were still pacifists. Conscientious objectors, like Charles Seeger, who sometimes lost their jobs for speaking out against the war. Their slogan in later years, perhaps against the background of Pete Seeger’s music, perhaps on a button, puts forth still two more fascinating uses of the verb “make” for us to ponder:
Listening to Newsom’s song, we hear the distant chink of bayonets and swords, but we also hear the clink of plowshares brushing stones aside.
(And the rattling nib writes,
“What did I make?”)
Thanks for reading! That’s all for part 2 of 3. Click below for the third and last installment (riveting, I promise!).
