“To maybe get there, yet”: Meaning and Mathematics in Joanna Newsom’s The Things I Say
In speaking with The New York Times and others, harpist and lyricist Joanna Newsom has acknowledged that her recent album Divers acts as a cohesive whole, something of an intricately woven tapestry. As I’ve spent the space of several half-days delving into individual songs (“Sapokanikan” and “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”), I’ve found it increasingly hard to resist the inter-textual and to speak about each in a vacuum — because the individual songs simply don’t exist within a vacuum. However, my exploration of her work isn’t nearly as intricate, so I heartily invite you to start by reading my first piece, then my second, as a backdrop to what I hope to relate about “The Things I Say”. Friends who’ve read these would also like to draw your attention to the links.
With that note, and the usual caveats, let’s hear what the harpist has to say:
The Things I Say
by Joanna Newsom, 2015
If I have the space of half a day,
I’m ashamed of half the things I say.
I’m ashamed to have turned out this way,
and I desire to make amends.But it don’t make no difference, now,
and no-one’s listening, anyhow,
and lists of sins and solemn vows
don’t make you any friends.There’s an old trick played,
when the light and the wine conspire
to make me think I’m fine.
I’m not, but I have got half a mind
to maybe get there, yet.When the sky goes pink in Paris, France,
do you think of the girl who used to dance
when you’d frame her moving within your hands,
saying This I won’t forget?What happened to the man you were,
when you loved somebody before her?
Did he die?
Or does that man endure, somewhere far away?Our lives come easy and our lives come hard.
We carry them like a pack of cards:
some we don’t use, but we don’t discard,
but keep for a rainy day.
Paradise Lost
The simplicity of the song’s emphatically reserved piano and voice and the haunting coo of its reversed coda underscore the heartbreaking sense of grief, mourning, and regret. We can relate. The sadness of what happened — or didn’t — in the past, of something once possessed, but no longer, touches all of us. In the face of it, we reach for the impossible, asking if we can turn back time, and are left with a meager substitute — to remember, to never forget.
Paradise Regained
Perhaps the most striking meta-moment of Newsom’s record comes at the end of this song, when those of us not hip enough to own a turntable have to resort to the internet to play it backwards. As simple as changing the rotation of the disc! The gesture calls our attention to not only the artistry of song, but the art of recording the song. Played backwards, we hear:
Somewhere far away
Make you any friends
Make you any friends
While others had experimented with capturing sound before him, Thomas Edison was the first to achieve playback. Historian Simon Schaffer reminds us, though, that the idea pre-dates Edison by centuries:
Recording technology doesn’t just capture sound, it also tries to bring it back to life. We live in a world of technologies that try to achieve this. In cinema, we have a machine that captures the light, and then brings it back to life…We think these are new technologies, but the story of automata shows just how old they are. Automata are machines that allow us to experience again the movements of a world we thought we’d lost.
The song’s speaker seems almost ready to resign herself to the state of things. And yet her acceptance becomes complicated through the record’s promise of revival. Peering back in time, she sees the ambiguously dead-or-alive man “frame [the dancer] moving within your hands”. Newsom polysemically conjures film (think of a director’s hands) and automata. The second image: a music box, complete with pirouetting ballerina.
Who is this dancer? We don’t know much, except that maybe she’s in Paree, or that the pink sky there evokes her memory. And that both “the girl who used to dance” and “somebody” have at some time colonized the man’s heart. Yet the first paramour-conquistador feels cheated by the sequence, by the linearity of time. If only it were the other way around…
So much cheating! Like a trickster with a “pack of cards”, wielding sleight of hand, time has snuck one past her. Throughout Divers, allusions and imagery explore optics and optical illusions, from the camouflaging “blind of winter leaves”, to the “splintered light” of Spring (refraction), to the “Great Light that shines through a pin-hole” (projection), to the mise-en-abîme of “an infinite regress” (reflection). Things are not always as they appear.
And what of the “old trick played” with light and wine in this song? Grief, alcohol, distorted vision — they go hand-in-hand. But what if the speaker isn’t simply drowning her sorrows? What if she’s talking about a real trick?
Let’s assume that you’re not incredulous and I’m not crazy for just a minute. My mind goes in a few directions as to why this little bar trick would console. First, the sheer topsy-turviness of it all reminds me of reversal. Streams flowing backwards and all that. Second, I’m drawn to the physics of the match, the heating of air like that in hot air balloons. The last direction, though, is to reflect on what draws the wine in.
While already an old idea, vacuum technology developed during the age of industrialization, particularly in conjunction with steam engines to keep miners from drowning. Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb also relied on vacuum technology to protect its fragile filament. Others then began to explore how vacuum tubes could amplify sound. In a work so immersed in water, light, and sound waves as Divers, the vacuum clearly plays its part. And we shouldn’t forget another critical wave connected to vacuums: gravity.
I’ll let you read up on that connection in your spare time. The thread we’ll follow leads us to what vacuums contain, and what was long believed that the heavens contained. Ancients called the substance “aether” — what the gods breathed. What Atlas pulls in long breaths as he’s “bearing weight”; what Prometheus inhales covertly while “taking fire”. The fifth element (after earth, air, fire, and water), alchemists knew it as the quinta essentia, the elixir of life.
When we think of alchemists today, we often write them off as fools, yet at the time the lines between science and wizardry were as blurred as a wino’s vision. Much of the universe remained shrouded in mystery, like a curtain pulled in front of truth.
I remember, as a child, shaking like the Tin Man in the face of that gigantic levitating green head. But have you ever stood back to ask why the floating head? The symbol is rooted deeper than we may think. In Norse mythology, the embalmed head of Mimir becomes a guide to Odin. Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau imagines the head of John the Baptist appearing to Salome. Friar Bacon, the alchemist who introduced optics to Oxford’s curriculum, becomes famous for a brass automaton. This floating “brazen head” speaks in cryptic terms, reminiscent of our song’s speaker and her plight:
Time is. Time was. Time is past.
So, the head of Oz comes from a long line of distinguished heads. Perhaps none more distinguished than the Greek mythological lyrist, Orpheus. After failing to keep his lover from the underworld, Orpheus is eventually beset and beheaded, yet the head sings as it floats out to sea. His ability to charm nature through music inspired the name of San Francisco’s Orpheum theater, which then grew into a country-wide chain known as the “Orpheum Circuit”, a series of performance venues for vaudeville acts.
Off the record
From vaudeville to cinema. From oral history to the printing press. From performing at court to cutting a record. From moment to Kodak Moment. These mnemonic gestures stave off death, in a way, for as long as the copy endures. As long as the memory holds. But what truly endures?
Did he die?
Or does that man endure, somewhere far away?
With his lyre and his voice, Orpheus successfully tricked death, descending into the underworld and returning to life. Like the Eleusinian mysteries referenced elsewhere in Divers, the Orphic mysteries drew religious participants to the promise of life eternal. The lure of infinity is not just a religious one, though. Scientists and mathematicians have pursued ∞ in their own way, starting with Zeno.
In his dichotomy paradox, Zeno wonders how you can ever get from point A to point B, if you have to go halfway, then halfway, then halfway… This all sounds quite familiar (especially if your ear has trouble distinguishing between “have” and “halve”).
If I have the space of half a day,
I’m ashamed of half the things I say.
I’m ashamed to have turned out this way,
[…]
I’m not, but I have got half a mind
to maybe get there, yet.
Never-ending numbers, whether rational (like 1/3) or irrational (like π), have interested mathematicians for centuries. By some calculations, they’ve collectively spent “literally thousands and thousands of lifetimes of mental toil and strain” trying to calculate pi alone. The work can be tedious and repetitive — in a word, mechanical.
Charles Babbage, inspired by the gears and cams used in clockwork and automata, spent his life dreaming up early computers — and never quite completing them. His work was certainly visionary, but like Edison, Newton, and countless other luminaries, he didn’t work alone. While Babbage saw the power of his machines to calculate numbers, it took someone else to see the beauty and potential beyond that. You might even say it took a poetic mind.
Again, [the computer] might act upon other things besides number, […] Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
What mind, writing in the middle of the 1800s, saw far enough to foretell digital music? Who explored the poetry of weaving numbers, of storing memory on cards? This was Ada Lovelace, whose mother raised her alone after a brief and troubled marriage. Whose father, Lord Byron, would never see her again. As he fled across the English Channel, the poet cried out to her in verse,
My daughter! with thy name this song begun —
My daughter! with thy name this much shall end —
I see thee not, I hear thee not, — but none
Can be so wrapt in thee; thou art the friend
To whom the shadows of far years extend:
Albeit my brow thou never shouldst behold,
My voice shall with thy future visions blend,
And reach into thy heart, when mine is cold, —
Read more…
A good Friday
Thanks again for diving into the meandering passages with me. It’s certainly been fun! And many thanks, again, to Joanna Newsom for sharing her music.
Well, folks. All this talk of death and life is a good reminder to stay hydrated. In my case, some fresh-pressed grapefruit at Van Kleef’s!
