“Not for a lack of language”: Trying to Fathom Joanna Newsom’s ‘Little Hand’
Eight years ago, Joanna Newsom released her album Divers, plunging her listeners into the rich universes her songs bring to life. The title track from the album, “Divers”, takes us deep into the sea with a pearl diver. While we don’t yet have official lyrics for any of the new songs she has started to play, the words of the new song “Little Hand” once again evoke an underwater world.
Like the notes I’ve written about “The Air Again” and “Marie at the Mill”, I thought I’d share some initial thoughts on the allusions made in the song, and the meaning that might be underlying. I’ll add to it over the next little bit as I get time.
It’s worth a big ole’ warning sticker on all of this — without official lyrics, I could misinterpret something, big or small. If you’re up for it, tag along!
Under the Sea
“Little Hand” begins with the words, “Take her down”, and soon we hear that
water contracts, our hold [or “hull”?] holds fast,
like the last of the iron lungs
Right away, we get a visual of submerging. The words “Take her down” have the tone of a military command. Paired with the visual of water and air tanks, the most obvious reference here is to a submarine boat. These vessels are typically gendered as “she” and “her”, as explained here by the Imperial War Museums:
Although it may sound strange referring to an inanimate object as ‘she’, this tradition relates to the idea of a female figure such as a mother or goddess guiding and protecting a ship and crew. Another idea is that in many languages, objects are referred to using feminine or masculine nouns. This is less common in English which tends to use gender-neutral nouns, however referring to ships as ‘she’ may refer to far more ancient traditions.
I could be wrong in my hearing — it may not be “our hold holds fast” — but if it is, I would want to point out that the “her” could also be a person (or other living thing) going underwater while holding on to another person. Newsom is a master of polysemy — multiple meanings — so we shouldn’t be surprised if she does that here!
Other terms and images appear throughout the song, calling to mind a submarine: “fore and aft”, “sonar softly pinging”, “our floating home”, “your periscope”, “are we ready to surface”. Perhaps the most direct reference to submarines is when Newsom sings “DSRV2 Avalon” — one of two Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles. As the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory reported:
DEEP SUBMERGENCE RESCUE VEHICLES MYSTIC and AVALON were developed as an improved method of rescuing the crew of a submarine immobilized on the sea floor. DSRV I MYSTIC was brought on line in 1971 and DSRV 2 AVALON reported shortly afterwards. The DSRV’s primary tasking is to rescue personnel from a U.S. Navy submarine should it become disabled during seatrials.
The devices used sophisticated technology derived in part from the space program. Both DSRVs were decommissioned in 2000, and the Avalon is displayed at the Morro Bay Maritime Museum in California, along Highway 1.
DSRV2 Avalon, wherever you are,
wherever you’ve gone
[…] Highway 1
we’ve been itching to meet you,
recommission to meet you
These lines seem like they’re spoken by a “we” who wants to be rescued from a submarine. They even hope the DSRV would be “recommision[ed]”. Let’s come back to that later.
Diving
I want to pause for a minute and acknowledge some echoes from Newsom’s Divers. When I wrote about Sapokanikan, I was struck by the specificity of “all of the Twenty Thousand” — she knows her literature too well to throw around a number like 20,000 and not take into consideration the famous Jules Verne novel (with the diving, pearls, and whatnot involved). Of course the action of the novel takes place on board a secret submarine that travels around the world.
Before I found out about these new songs, I was reflecting on “Time, as a Symptom”, and explored some connections between that work and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In particular, I was drawn to the lines:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
The lines talk about a supposed shipwreck victim, lying at the bottom of the sea. I know this is a little stretch, but in “Little Hand”, Newsom sings:
our god and king, thy father watches the sheep
The biblical tone no doubt comes through — and I think intentionally so — “thy father” appears throughout the Bible. But part of me just wonders… if “thy father” is sleeping in his sea-bed, watching the sheep? We’re talking about water, we’re talking about shipwrecks of a sort, and we’re talking about “miles and leagues”. You’d better believe that the master of polysemy knows that “fathom” has a lovely double-meaning (both “measure the depth of water” and “comprehend”)!
“Little Hand” alludes directly to Shakespeare, too. The line comes from Much Ado About Nothing, the comedy/romance play about young couples and some near misses brought on by eavesdropping and rumors. In it, the singer and servant Balthasar sings about the disloyalty of men towards women:
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny, nonny.Sing no more ditties, sing no more
Of dumps so dull and heavy.
The fraud of men was ever so
Since summer first was leafy.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey, nonny, nonny.
[emphasis added]
The term “nonny-nonny” was a nonsense phrase, so Balthasar’s suggests that the ladies should let go of their worries. As an aside, the line about men standing with “one foot in sea, and one on shore” is reminiscent of the many liminal spaces we see in Newsom’s work. Maybe we’ll come back to that later.
We were just talking about polysemy, so we can’t read this passage without a word or two about nothing. To people of Shakespeare’s time, the words “nothing” and “noting” sounded the same. So the characters didn’t just make a fuss about nothing, they were also making a fuss about noting (a synonym for eavesdropping), and also, scholars surmise, making a fuss about n o-thing. An O-thing, to people of that time, was slang for vagina — the characters in the play get riled up about rumors that the young girl (called Hero) is not a virgin. So the Bard loved some good poly-meaning, too!
Just before Balthasar sings the song above, there’s a fun exchange he has with the Prince— playing on the meaning of “note”:
PRINCE
Or if thou wilt hold longer argument,
Do it in notes.BALTHASAR
Note this before my notes:
There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.PRINCE
Why, these are very crotchets that he speaks!
Note notes, forsooth [which means “indeed”], and nothing.
So we have “note” meaning to notice or pay attention to, and also musical notes.
Let’s come back to the nonny-nonny for a moment. In Balthasar’s song, the woe is converted or changed into nonsense. There’s a sense of agency and autonomy in that conversion. But in “Little Hand”, if I hear it correctly, the woe is garbled into nonsense:
garbling all our sounds of woe
into hey, nonny, nonny, nonny
Suddenly we take a turn for the tragic. Someone attempts to communicate their struggle and despair, and they’re not understood. Were their notes noted, or nothing?
Collecting Shells
“Little Hand” doesn’t just operate in the cold, mechanical realm of the submarine. It also introduces a storyline or metaphor connected with nature. Early in the song, we hear:
the raft of the violet snail
Violet sea snails’ scientific name is Janthina janthina, though there are other species in the Janthina genus that are called violet snails, too. Either way, it’s not surprising, then, when later in the song, Newsom sings:
even Janthina once was as you are […]
only Janthina can defeat the Men o’ War
Violet sea snails spend their time floating at the surface of the ocean. They cannot swim, but instead create what’s called a “bubble raft” by capturing air from above the surface in a mucus they secrete. Like submarines, they need the air to stay alive. If the snails become submerged, they sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Floating at the surface, violet snails feed on other ocean creatures that float in the same strata. The song alludes to how the snails eat siphonophores like the Portuguese Man o’ War, which floats on the ocean surface. (Of course, in the presence of submarines we’re also talking about submarine-vs-battleship warfare). As NOAA explains:
Resembling an 18th-century Portuguese warship under full sail, the man o’ war is recognized by its balloon-like float, which may be blue, violet, or pink and rises up to six inches above the waterline.
A few things worth pointing out here. First, the “balloon-like” air sac and the resemblance to a Portuguese warship. Other sources identify that the resemblance is to a 15th-century Portuguese warship, also called a caravel. I know this is a tangent, but of course for me it calls up Newsom’s song “Bridges and Balloons”:
We sailed away on a winter’s day
with fate as malleable as clay;
but ships are fallible, I say,
and the nautical, like all things, fades.And I can recall our caravel:
[…]The sight of bridges and balloons
makes calm canaries irritable; [emphasis added]
Again, I’m not saying these two songs are intertwined, but just saying I can’t help but think of it.
Going back to the biology of violet snails, then. Their shells are violet on one part, fading to white on the other. The dark side faces towards the air, to camouflage it from above against the dark ocean, while the white side faces down, blending in with the bright sky (if you’re looking from below). The purple color comes from their diet of creatures like the man o’ war and other hydrozoa. Not only do they camouflage themselves using it, but they also create a purple dye with it called Ianthinin, which scientist Alan Beu describes:
This [observation] seems to indicate that the dye has an anaesthetic effect in Janthina, besides its camouflaging and antagonistic effects.
The snail’s bubble raft takes on additional meaning when we take into consideration the mother/child vocabulary of the song. Janthina carries its eggs by attaching them to the raft. Sometimes the raft gets blown ashore and they “get stuck”.
One more interesting factoid about violet sea snails. They are hermaphrodites, starting life as males, and gradually transforming into females — quite the “sea-change”, to borrow Shakespeare’s words!
Where does Janthina get its name? The word comes from the Greek for violet flower. And of course there’s a Greek myth to describe that connection — the story of Ianthe, one of the Oceanids. Having recently written about the Demeter and Persephone myth’s connection with Divers, I was surprised to see Ianthe present at the abduction of Persephone. The girls were collecting flowers, innocently, when Hades appeared and abducted the goddess. As the Homeric Hymn tells it:
All we were playing in a lovely meadow, Leucippe and Phaeno and Electra and Ianthe, […and others]: we were playing and gathering sweet flowers in our hands, soft crocuses mingled with irises and hyacinths, and rose-blooms and lilies, marvellous to see, and the narcissus which the wide earth caused to grow yellow as a crocus. That I plucked in my joy; but the earth parted beneath, and there the strong lord, the Host of Many, sprang forth and in his golden chariot he bore me away, all unwilling, beneath the earth: then I cried with a shrill cry.
However, the story of Ianthe that I’m drawn to, in light of our violet snail, is the one Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses. In the story of Iphis and Ianthe, the poet tells of a father who wants a boy, and when the mother gives birth to a girl, the child is given the gender-ambiguous name Iphis, and is raised as a boy. When Iphis grows up, a wedding is arranged with the beautiful Ianthe, however Iphis struggles:
So unsuspected love had filled their hearts with equal longing — but how different! Ianthe waits in confidence and hope the ceremonial as agreed upon, and is quite certain she will wed a man. But Iphis is in love without one hope of passion’s ecstasy, the thought of which only increased her flame; and she a girl is burnt with passion for another girl!
Eventually, Iphis is transformed into a man. For me, this is reminiscent of the snail’s transformation, though I’ll be honest that the connection to Newsom’s song may be tenuous.
Sea Changes
Nonetheless, there is an intriguing reference to change and similarity:
even Janthina once was as you are
That “once was as you are” sparks the imagination. Is Newsom referring to a submarine on the surface, but now being “pull[ed] down through the rayless water”? Could she be alluding to the sex change the snails undergo? Or, in a scientific way, is the song speaking about evolutionary change?
Scholars have traced the evolution of snails, and found that they are related to bivalves like oysters, but also cephalopods like squid and octopus.
Let’s just imagine that some of those related animals have a shell like Janthina, and also float at the surface of the ocean. If anyone could find such a creature, it would be the intrepid adventurers from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, who encountered all manner of sea life. Well — you guessed it — they did!
At five o’clock in the evening, [we] were astonished by a curious spectacle.
It was a shoal of argonauts travelling along on the surface of the ocean. We could count several hundreds. […]
These graceful molluscs moved backwards by means of their locomotive tube, through which they propelled the water already drawn in. Of their eight tentacles, six were elongated, and stretched out floating on the water, whilst the other two, rolled up flat, were spread to the wing like a light sail. I saw their spiral-shaped and fluted shells, which Cuvier justly compares to an elegant skiff. A boat indeed! It bears the creature which secretes it without its adhering to it.
For nearly an hour the Nautilus floated in the midst of this shoal of molluscs. Then I know not what sudden fright they took. But as if at a signal every sail was furled, the arms folded, the body drawn in, the shells turned over, changing their centre of gravity, and the whole fleet disappeared under the waves. Never did the ships of a squadron manœuvre with more unity.
Argonauts are cephalopods, like squid, and in ancient times were thought to use their arms like oars and sails:
In 300 B.C., Aristotle proposed the female argonaut used her shell as a boat and her eight arms to row and sail.
Scientists have found that the female argonaut traps air from the surface in her shell to control their buoyancy. Only the female creates a shell, which she uses to protect her young — the air helps her keep from sinking to the ocean floor. This sounds familiar to the violet snail, right? I know it’s a stretch to be talking about this other creature, especially without a direct “name check” from Newsom (or at least not one I can distinguish). I would be tempted to agree. Except that we found the Argonaut Mine, site of suffocation, in “The Air Again”. And in this song, we have so many references to sinking submarines. Maybe even one of the most deadly submarine wrecks — the USS Argonaut?
If you’d like to read more about the study of argonauts (the animal), I’d suggest this piece by Maria Popova at The Marginalian. I don’t mean to imply that Jeanne Villepreux-Power is referenced in “Little Hand”, but her story is certainly an empowering reminder of the ways women have unlocked scientific discovery where men and the “establishment” have fallen short.
If you’d like to read more about other meanings of the term “argonaut”, or the backstory with Jason, or if you’d like to read about other references to sea snails in the new songs, I’ve added some new sections about those to my piece on “The Air Again”.
I’ll stop here for now. Thanks for reading, and tune in again later for more notes.
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