“Just plain vamoose”: Unidentified Falling Objects in Joanna Newsom’s Goose Eggs
And so we continue, down the mines and in the dark…I feel a bit like Sam-I-Am peddling his wares and half expecting to hear the protest: “I would not, could not, in the rain. / Not in the dark. Not on a train”. But trust me, we’ll end up more open minded at the other end, even though I can’t promise all the answers.
(If you’re just tuning in, welcome! Take a gander at what I’ve written about a few other songs from Divers, too: about “Sapokanikan”, on “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”, on “The Things I Say”, and about one simple but powerful word in “Time, as a Symptom”.)
Before we jump in, give “Goose Eggs” another listen, or read the lyrics below, or both!
Goose Eggs
by Joanna Newsom, 2015
What we built, at the kiln that won’t be stilled,
did not set well:The old veil of desire,
like vessels that we fired,
fell thin as eggshells.And every season, somebody burns,
downtown, taking turns —
taking a bus, to take a train and just plain vamoose.
Now the wind blows coals over the hills. Honey,
I’ve been paying my bills,
but honey it’s been a long time since I’ve come to any use.
And it hurt me bad, when I heard the news
that you’d got that call, and could not refuse.(A goose, alone, I suppose, can know the loneliness of geese,
who never find their peace,
whether north, or south, or west, or east;
and I could never find my way
to being the kind of friend you seemed to need in me,
till the needing had ceased.)Recently, a bottle of rye, and a friend, and me,
on our five loose legs,
had a ramble, and spoke
of the scrambling of broken hopes, and goose eggs,
and of a stranger, long ago.
(Not you, honey! You, I know.)
We just spoke of broken hopes and old strangers.
Now the wind blows coals over the sea. Tell you what, honey:
you and me better run and see if we can’t contain them, first.But you had somewhere that you had to go,
and you caught that flight out of Covalo.
Now, overhead, you’re gunning in those Vs,
where you had better find your peace,
whether north, or south, or west, or east.
And I had better find my way
to being the kind of friend you seemed to need in me,
at last (at least).What’s redacted will repeat,
and you cannot learn that you burn when you touch the heat,
so we touch the heat,
and we cut facsimiles of love and death
(just separate holes in sheets
where you cannot breathe, and you cannot see).And I cannot now, for the life of me, believe our talk —
our flock had cause to leave,
but do we?
do we?
Throughout Divers, we see things descending to earth: little leaves, poor flight attendants, hotdogging loons, daredevilish pilots. At first glance, however, “Goose Eggs” appears to focus more on taking flight, lifting off, rather than landing. Its light-footed instrumental overture almost makes you want to hop along like a pioneering aeronaut!
The song’s speaker tells of “our flock” leaving, of how “you caught that flight”, and in characteristically doubled fashion, the both comically light and saddeningly dark way that people “vamoose”.
In one of her most deft displays of polysemy in Divers, Newsom writes of how three characters “spoke / of the scrambling of broken hopes and goose eggs, / and of a stranger long ago”. Notice how much that word does: scrambling. 1, we’re in Sam-I-Am’s familiar territory, whipping up some eggs. 2, we see that aspirations can get jumbled and dashed. But “scramble” also has a few more meanings we should take into account. 3, a military maneuver, the speedy preparation and takeoff of war planes. And 4, the scrambling of communications, encoded messages, cryptic words. A “text [that] will not yield”.
This line is a real enigma. Given the speaker’s attempt to allay fears — “(Not you, honey! You, I know.)” —there’s certainly a plausible reading of the “stranger, long ago” as a former lover or such. But what if the “stranger” is simply that? Just a stranger, taking off?
A ramble in the woods
Imagine you’ve gone out hiking in the woods, perhaps up to Leech Lake Mountain to hunt for jade. You wouldn’t be expecting to see the wreckage of a B-17 Flying Fortress among the trees, yet that’s what was discovered there in August 1943. In fact, you can still come across parts of the downed aircraft there today.
Less than three months before that discovery, the crew of the B-17F took off from Alicia Airport on a training circuit (note, too, the cadence of cardinal directions):
№ 318 took off from Marysville, California, with 2500 gallons of gas on board, on an over-water mission. Weather forecast indicated good weather. Flight route was Marysville to point 150 miles West, then North to point West of Eugene, Oregon, then to Eugene, back West 200 miles, South to point West of Clear Lake, California, East to Clear Lake for pursuit interception, then return.
The official report eventually concludes: “It is believed that the lost aircraft encountered the unexpected bad weather and either crashed over the sea or became lost in the weather.” The nearest town to Leech Lake Mountain is Covelo, CA.
A stir about spelling
Let’s briefly pause to talk about the critical issue of the alphabet. You might point out that Newsom’s lyric is spelled “Covalo”, with an A. I don’t disagree, nor do I doubt its intentionality. So, I’ll share a few thoughts about ABCs for those who are puzzling on this.
Since there is no exact place named Covalo, we have to conclude that, just like “simulacreage”, it’s a creation of the artist. In fact, historians speculate that Covelo, CA, is simply a misspelling or interpretative spelling of Covolo, Italy. So a precedent exists! That shifty vowel… Meanwhile, you might also see “Covalo with an A” as a mash-up of two places in California — Covelo and Covallo Point. The latter sits at the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. I’ll let you explore that potential connection on your own (though I may make a nod to it later on).
What mighty contests rise from trivial things! Whatever deeper meaning is hidden in this orthographical elusion, I’m most struck by how she’s scrambled the message, effectively throwing listeners off-track. I think Joanna would chuckle that a year after releasing Divers, after many mentions of Covelo, no one has yet to ask, “why Covelo?”. Especially since this record repeatedly invites us to plunge below the surface.
In an album littered with plane crashes (most memorably John Purroy Mitchel’s), why wouldn’t Newsom incorporate the story of a fated flight that took off from (and was meant to return to) a small airport at the base of the Yuba River?
What goes up…
Others have mentioned the connection between various songs on Divers and the mythological character of Icarus. He was given wings by his masterful father, Daedalus (you’ll recall that Joyce had a fascination with the famed labyrinth-designer, and I’d speculate that JN can’t help but see her own similarities to him), but he couldn’t restrain himself. A poor-willed pilot, of sorts. Throughout mythology and history, we see these hubristic falls repeat themselves. Phaethon, who mistakenly thought he could drive the sun god’s chariot, only to scorch the earth. Milton’s Lucifer (first mentioned by Dr. Rebecca Varley-Winter), “Hurld headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Skie”. The first balloonist, Pilâtre de Rozier, who set his experimental hydrogen/hot-air balloon aflame. John Purroy Mitchel. The list continues… “and you cannot learn that you burn when you touch the heat”.
Yet we also see figures like the Françoise de Morière, the falling Triangle Shirtwaist workers, the “little leaf lying on the ground”, and the crew of B-17 №318 who don’t embody the Icarus complex. How do we situate them? How can we make sense of the deaths they didn’t “deserve”? They’re not Maverick, cocky and arrogant. They’re Goose.
But you had somewhere that you had to go,
and you caught that flight out of Covalo.
Now, overhead, you’re gunning in those Vs,
where you had better find your peace,
whether north, or south, or west, or east.
These images give us a new window into the lines above. Newsom has transformed the horrific plane crash into a takeoff — like migrating geese, the dead airmen are moving on to a place where they can hopefully “find [their] peace”.
I keep coming back to the titular goose eggs. We’ve seen them before in Newsom’s “Baby Birch” (“Hear the goose, / cussing at me over her eggs.”), and moreover they’ve woven their way into our culture. For instance, Aesop’s fable of an alchemical goose cautions against avarice, and the impulse of discovery:
As he grew rich he grew greedy; and thinking to get at once all the gold the Goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to find, — nothing.
This theme has appeared in other songs on Divers. Meanwhile, when we start to connect geese, eggs, and falling, my American mind goes somewhere familiar, even nostalgic: Mother Goose, and her famous egg.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
When you read it again, you’ll detect no mention of an egg. We’ve held this poem so near for so long, that it’s difficult to reconsider it as a riddle, but it once was! Like many mysteries when they’re solved, the “solution” appears self-evident. The veil falls “thin as eggshells”. That proximity may also have blinded us to the darkness of the poem’s message, a shattering not to be undone. Humpty truly is a scrambled egg, in more senses than one! And similar to the dissected goose in Aesop’s fable, the damage cannot be repaired, try as we might.
Amidst a weft of imaginative characters, colorful worlds, and allusions to light and photography, Tarsem Singh weaves the friendship of two fallen characters and a children’s tale. Thinking back to that discussion Newsom had with Dave Eggers, I remember that she asked us to imagine “someone just finding out that we die. Imagine if you didn’t know, and someone just told you that that’s included in the experience of life”. Crossing the chasm from innocence to knowledge. The reaction of the little girl in The Fall rings out:
I don’t like this story!
Speaking of kids, let’s not forget the Italian children’s game, il gioco dell’oca (the game of the goose) — perhaps better known to some through a variant with roots in India, Snakes and Ladders. The game introduces fortuitous gains and unlucky setbacks, as players move along a spiral path. Even architect Aldo Rossi was inspired by its themes of death and fate when he designed his San Cataldo cemetery, circling in toward a communal tomb.
Like the eternal knot seen before, the form — the shape — of the game is archetypal:
The spiral challenges linearity. The ability to return to nearly the same place as before, but with a new perspective. Here’s a riddle: where have we seen this shape before?
Dante’s circles of hell — and Minos’s wrapped tail assigning punishment. The Phaistos Disk, discovered in a Minoan palace, shows a circling pattern of ancient characters that scholars, like hunters, have begun to decipher into a prayer to a mother-goddess. And it was Minos, too, who had a maze built to hide his shameful grandson. Daedalus’s labyrinth.
To read Borges’ description of a certain labyrinth, you’d think he were talking about Newsom’s record:
“In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?”
I thought a moment and replied, “The word chess.”
“Precisely,” said Albert. “The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time; this recondite cause prohibits its mention. To omit a word always, to resort to inept metaphors and obvious periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic way of stressing it. […]”
Time, scrambled. Going “north, or south, or west, or east”, we’ve been circling in on some kind of peace, some eye of the hurricane. I imagine you’ve answered my riddle, too, in your own way. You’ve noticed the spiral has appeared in other places in Divers. Nemo, Nolan, and Edison guard a few of the secrets, like Ariadne and her clew.
…must come down
Fables, board games, nursery rhymes…all kid stuff! Newsom ends the song with a question — a repeated one, almost child-like in its simplicity.
but do we?
do we?
Lewis Carroll, too, believed in innocence, and understood the clarity and sometimes unintentional profoundness of children’s questions. When Alice bumps into Humpty Dumpty on her trip through the looking glass (a mirrored world, of sorts), their conversation takes a fascinating and sinuous course through the mires of language and interpretation.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’
I’ll leave these few observations as they are, and resist the urge to wrap it up in a neat bow. Joanna Newsom has once again shown herself to be a master of words (even the temperamental verbs!).
There was a long pause.
‘Is that all?’ Alice timidly asked.
‘That’s all,’ said Humpty Dumpty. ‘Good-bye.’
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