No ceiling bearing down on me
A love letter to the lyrics of Fisherman’s Blues by The Waterboys
I wish I was a fisherman
Tumblin’ on the seas
Far away from dry land
And its bitter memories
The house was in the hills, about fifteen minutes’ drive up a winding road from a small medieval town straddling a silken clear river. The town nestled neatly into a natural vineyard-lined amphitheatre, and also into its acquired role as a sleepily traditional tourist outpost, deep in the south west of France.
Retreat. Recharge.
We drove. Caught the ferry, stopped off on the way down. No plane plonking us down cold, instead our immersion was gradual. The heat, the language, the culture — each intensifying as we made it further south west, edging nearer a holiday that promised everything our holidays always promise us.
Time off the grid. Time with each other. A chance to re-connect with something more elemental, more authentic perhaps. Time to slow down, to notice once more.
Casting out my sweet line
With abandonment and love
No ceiling bearin’ down on me
Save the starry sky above
Noticing’s not so natural these days, it seems. At work, amid the incessant throb of modern life, our default setting is distraction. As this wonderful piece points out, urban reality creates a “shield of inattention.” It stops us connecting with the world, and gets thicker and heavier the longer we stay behind it. We move more quickly than ever, and notice less.
Holiday, as I’ve just experienced, is a time when that shield can lift a little. We are able to notice, connect a little more naturally. We cast out our sweet line a little, hoping something meaningful will bite.
And while I never played it in the car, it was Fisherman’s Blues that played in my head as we moved down through France, travelling far away from our metaphorical dry land. We might not have quite been tumbling on the sea, but we felt borne by abandonment and love.
Tomorrow I will be loosened
From bonds that hold me fast
That the chains all hung around me
Will fall away at last
I started to notice and appreciate more about this song, this shanty that celebrates the removal of blinkers so that we in turn might notice and appreciate more. This song about a fisherman that isn’t actually sung by a fisherman. This blues that isn’t really a blues, but rather a gospel song in disguise. A hymn to nature, to the past, and, as all gospel songs are, to the future, charged as it is by a promise of a better tomorrow.
Fisherman’s Blues is an escape, a act of disentanglement. It represents Mike Scott’s quest for something more real, away from the machinery of modern, corporate life. This was the journey, a more permanent one than ours, that Scott took when he made the album (also called Fisherman’s Blues). The song, like our holiday, asks you to re-connect with something freer, more meaningful. A step back in time that triggered a great artistic leap forward.
A journey is not only about its destination, of course, but also the place of departure. For us, that was packed routines, deadlines, responsibilities. For Scott, it is bonds, chains, and bitter memories. In both cases what’s most powerful is that the dream we’re running from will magically fall away. That it will remain somehow back there, on that figurative dry land, and therefore cease to exist.
As if with one glimpse of the town, the mountain, the house, the pool, we shall all be happy. This was what our drive was like. Tomorrow I will be loosened.
I wish I was the brakeman
On a hurtlin’ fevered train
Crashing a-headlong into the heartland
Like a cannon in the rain
The promise of Fisherman’s Blues is a tomorrow where troubles are left behind. Existence is less complex, and is passed to the hands of a higher power, an elemental force that we don’t control.
Tumblin’ on the seas… On a hurtlin’ fevered train…
But that tomorrow is also a yesterday. Where once travel broadened the mind, now we use it to narrow our focus. We free ourselves of modern burdens by squeezing ourselves into the simplicity of other people’s less modern lives. We eat their food, walk their hills, live by their rituals. Maybe we want to recapture what we have lost, live how we might have lived. Perhaps we are trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Certainly it feels like trying to get back to what’s important.
With the beating of the sleepers
And the burnin’ of the coal
Counting the towns flashing by
In a night that’s full of soul
You can hear the visceral reality of these old lives, hard as they are, beating out through the song. Routines and rituals here are built around making ends meet, not self-actualisation. But Fisherman’s Blues makes you hanker for that simple life, makes you feel you could live it. It’s like reading On The Road again. Magical.
And that “woo” that finishes each chorus of Fisherman’s Blues contains everything — release, hope, happiness. It’s the sound of a night that’s full of soul. Modern life, with its ceilings and bonds and chains and bitter memories, has had its soul caged. We want — need — to escape it for something more meaningful. Nights full of noise (and forgetting, and indulgence) are easy to come by in the city. Less so connection, discovery, delight, wonder. We all need that.
And on that fine and fateful day
I will take me in my hands
I will ride on the train
I will be the fisherman
And so, of course, there’s a girl. The lives that Scott imagines are just ciphers. Or rather, I like to think, mirror images of the life he imagines with her. The life of the fisherman is the life of the brakeman is the simplicity and happiness and truth of being in love. With one of them in place, he only needs the other to be complete. Life, redux.
And while holidays aren’t always as perfect as the dreams they might inspire, being surrounded by the people you love most in the world, constantly, is as much the point of it all as the experience of escape.
With light in my head
You in my arms
What good is the light in your head, the song asks, without the people you love in your arms?
Since you got this far, would you mind going a little further?
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